Pegasystems on negative influences on the user experience 7 Main vices of user experience design
The user experience often determines the success of an app, web or service offer. Because once potential users are scared away, they don’t come back so quickly. Pegasystems has discussed seven major bugs.
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Pegasystems has identified seven major sins that can be extremely damaging to the user experience. (Photo by Maruxa Lomoljo Koren / Pexels )
The intuitive or at least simple operation of apps, websites and cloud services should actually be a matter of course; after all, developers are also software users themselves. Nevertheless, it seems that software design and engineering professionals can not always prevail.
Even today, an optimal user experience is not a matter of course, emphasizes Pegasystems, based on the main vices of the Catholic Church, the software specialist has identified seven “deadly sins” that prevent a provider – or at least its solutions – from rising in user favor.
Data greed: Especially e-commerce platforms and online retailers often design the queries on cookies and tracking settings to their advantage and not in the sense of the best user experience. For example, users can usually agree to a maximum data collection with a single click, but have to go through several steps and clicks to turn it off. This deliberately makes it difficult for users to protect their data.
Seduction: Especially on portals of travel agencies, low-cost airlines and car rental companies, patterns of the so-called “dark UX” are a common practice: learned user behavior is misused to maximize profits. For example, primary buttons, which actually always serve the same purpose, such as confirmation or navigation, are suddenly used for something completely different – namely, the purchase of an additional service.
Paternalism: Many streaming and social media platforms automatically play supposedly individually preferred content without the consent of the users. This suggests comfort and personalization, but in truth they want to increase the engagement rate of their services above all. For this, they accept to patronize their users and deny them their freedom of choice.
Sneakiness: Often, users receive time-limited and free trial offers for services only if they deposit their payment data. After the trial period has expired, the providers can then easily issue invoices if the users fail to cancel. The providers focus specifically on the forgetfulness of the customers in order to turn free offers into as many paid services as possible.
Idleness: All too often, website operators simply turn their own problems into the problems of their users. An example of this is the use of captchas. Users are asked to identify signs and symbols in order to prevent spam by bots and automatic data extraction from websites. This saves operators the costs of implementing their own spam filters.
Inertia: Websites, apps and digital services often lack the responsiveness of their user interfaces. The users can therefore not interact with them fluently and are annoyed by long loading times instead of dealing with the content. However, the reaction and loading times have a decisive influence on the attention of the users and are a decisive factor for whether they use a website, an app or a service again.
Sloppiness: If third-party services are used, for example to process the payment process, they should be integrated so deeply that they enable users to use them seamlessly. In some cases, however, the integration is only superficially implemented by the providers and thus forces users to jump back and forth between different systems in a cumbersome manner.
Maciej Szaniawski, Innovation & Design Lead EMEA at Pegasystems, warns: “[Solche Methoden und Nachlässigkeiten] it may even lead to savings or increasing sales in the short term, but it will have a devastating effect in the long term. Users become frustrated, upset and lose trust – and will simply turn away as a result.“
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