This week’s lecture concentrated around the themes of design and strategy, we started by looking at BHAGs (Big Hairy Ambitious Goals) and other ways we can motivate ourselves and our teams and focus on the main aims for a project. We also looked at the project proposals we have all been developing in the first three weeks and discussed these. We them moved on to an exercise to help us frame our design challenge, to help us form our design question. We covered some more UX laws and techniques including Hick’s Law and dark patterns. We finished the day’s class with another exercise this time looking at Tomorrow’s Narratives, by creating a piece showing where we would like to see our project when complete. This helped me to see the impact that I wanted my project to have and will help me stay motivated. It is also a useful piece to refer back to during the rest of the project to remind myself the original aims and goals of the project.
During this week’s lecture we spoke about onboarding the process of introducing users to a new app or product usually through a step-by-step process. I have looked at onboarding in the past and have created onboarding journeys for my users in previous projects, but I have never looked at the other side of a user’s journey offboarding which we also looked at during the lecture. I wanted to look at offboarding more closely as allowing users to successfully complete their journey with an app and leave completely including erasing their data, should be a process that is considered and designed as user-centrically as any other part of the User Experience.
I started by reading this article *https://uxbooth.com/articles/offboarding-how-and-how-not-to-end-relationships-with-users/* which is all about the offboarding experience and how to improve it. I think we have all had an experience were trying to delete an account or end a subscription has been significantly harder than it should be. For example, I remember assisting someone to delete their Facebook account, they had no more use for it, and they simply wanted to remove it and move on. Not only was it hard enough to find the right part of the Facebook website to delete the account but when I got there, I found I needed to disable the account for three weeks and then assuming no-one logged in to the account it would be deleted. Looking at this from Facebook’s perspective they seem to want to give you time to consider removing your account and hope that you might change your mind. However, in this case and I’m sure in many others, people’s minds are already made up, the decision is made, and they simply want to delete the account and move on. This leaves users frustrated and even more sure they want nothing more to do with Facebook. I also see issues from Facebook’s side, making it such a frustrating process to remove an account means people simply don’t bother leaving lots of dormant accounts on the platform which can be prone to being hacked, causing a whole world of other issues. Maybe having a high number of accounts appeals to advertisers and earns Facebook more money, but is it worth the reputational damage not to mention the cost of storing all the account details for these dormant accounts?
Maybe for a huge business such as Facebook, with the ability to handle negative views, but for a smaller business the reputational damage of not making the offboarding process easy could have more serious consequences.
The thing is it is not that hard to design an offboarding process that offers a good user experience, you simply need to design the offboarding process with the same aims as you do the rest of the user experience. Take the onboarding process for example with this as a designer I spend lots of time considering how I can make it as easy as possible for my users to start to use my product. I do research, I test ideas, I present the process for critique to my peers all so I can gain the feedback I need to optimise the process and make it as user-friendly as possible. I need to do the same for offboarding and there is a good reason why as shown from an anecdote from the article above. Where a user who can offboard from a product easily is more likely to come back to that product if they need. They won’t however, return to a product where they had to spend lots of time and battle a frustrating process to offboard.
In truth, it seems like making the offboarding process more complicated than it needs to be and having the process provide a poor user experience is a mistake by businesses. Yes, you may retain the accounts or details of some users who simply give up on the offboarding process, preferring to simply leave the account dormant or allow the emails to continue to arrive (as two examples). However, they will remember the frustration of trying to offboard and are unlikely to return to the product or read the emails you send (much more likely to mark them as spam and allow their email program to filter them out). So, does poor offboarding retain users? Maybe on paper but in the real world I feel it is clear it is much more likely to alienate users and cost the business in the long run.
This week’s class was really useful as it helped me to look at ways to turn the wide-ranging healthcare research I had been doing for the past two weeks, into a much more focused plan for my project. By looking at what my BHAGs are, framing the design challenge I want to solve and looking at tomorrow’s narrative to inspire me I feel I am on the path to narrowing down my research into a specific area where I can build a project from.
Looking at offboarding has also been useful, there is a part of me that thinks the amount of major companies that do make it so difficult it must be of some benefit to them. However, in reading articles and thinking of my own experience I genuinely can’t find a benefit, so for me I believe making the offboarding process a good user experience is the correct way to go. I may be losing a customer but they may return whereas one who has went through a poor offboarding experience never will.
I also know my next steps in my project which are to develop my user personas and jobs to be done, these will help me further focus my project and ensure I am designing in a user-centric way.