Exploring User Friction and Confusion to Lead a Better User Experience
It Starts with Empathy
When thinking about design, empathy plays a vital role in the process of making our experiences both easy and pleasant to use. Vicariously seeing through others, allows us to expand our perspectives, connect with others, and ultimately, become better designers.
While we conduct user research, we begin to understand the user’s behavior, difficulties, and needs even if they are often unaware themselves. This is not a simple task and requires a deep appreciation of people and how they interact with the world around them in order to create intuitive and consistent experiences that are enjoyable.
“First and foremost I look for empathy, because design is not art, it’s actually solving real problems for people.” — Jon Wiley
Empathy, Uncovers Pain Points
Through the use of empathy, we can begin to uncover pain points. In order to identify and fix these pain points we can use processes such as building out detailed user journeys. This helps create a visualization in order to study all aspects of interaction a user has with a product in-depth. We can then utilize the findings to build out products. This step of understanding pain points is not easy and we can spend a lot of time analyzing and deconstructing it in order to solve for it.
Following a user journey can reveal new insights.
Exploring User Friction and Confusion
These pain points that users face can translate into user friction and confusion. Anytime we identify an instance of user friction, we need to lean into it. Likewise, anytime user confusion arises, we need to start spinning our gears. Both are useful identifiers that there are issues you can begin to explore and discover.
User friction is like driving on a flat tire. It is any unpleasant obstacle or hurdle, no matter how small, that a user has to go through in order to reach their goal. This manifests in things like difficultly for users to navigate, interact, and/or convert on your website or app. This results in a negative experience and can be costly in a multitude of ways.
User friction is any obstacle that makes a task more difficult to complete.
User confusion is the result of not knowing why. It’s how we feel when an unexpected behavior occurs that we don’t understand. But it is also how we learn new things. It’s in our nature to try to understand things we do not know. And empathizing with what it’s like to not know is how we can begin to make things easier to understand and use.
User confusion can be uncomfortable but leads to understanding why.
One is a difficulty you experience, the other is when you experience an unknown variable.
If you boil it down, one is a difficulty you experience, the other is when you experience an unknown variable. Both are common occurrences that users go through when using products and can teach us valuable lessons.
Asking these questions can be revealing in making better experiences:
- Why is this confusing to use?
- Is something difficult to use or find?
- Are we asking too much of the user?
- Did an event occur that wasn’t communicated properly?
Spending more time to properly explore friction and confusion allows designers to create better, well thought-out solutions.
Pain as the Source for Improvement
Walking in your user’s shoes can uncover their pain points and lead to implementing better practices and design. Spending more time to properly explore friction and confusion allows designers to create better, well thought-out solutions instead of just bandaging an issue.
Learning and applying our findings to well thought-out solutions.
User friction and confusion can both be useful as a source of discovering and learning. Not only that, but being comfortable with them as part of the research and design process can be rewarding in understanding your users better. As a designer, a healthy dose of pain from time to time can lead to new findings and crafting better experiences.
