This time of year, many folks are online shopping. That provides even more chances to have great user experiences across the web, or unfortunately, terrible user experiences. Coming off of the Black Friday / Cyber Monday week, almost everyone can relate to a story about a webpage that wouldn’t load or crashed during checkout, and hopefully many can relate to those who had seamless experiences finding or buying the item they’ve had their eye on. Asking folks to be more mindful of their experiences can be a good learning opportunity for the team.
The breadth of experiences shared during this exercise was surprising. On the positive side: a cocktail app that was helping an amateur bartender expertly mix drinks using ingredients they already had available; a fashion website with a clever visual delineation of what colors of an item were on backorder and which were ready to ship; a banking app with clear information available and tasks easy to navigate. On the frustrating side: a clever new AI plus bird feeder that made you wait in line before even seeing the price/options; a metropolitan public school website that made both navigating data and a map of school impossible; a popular recipe website without robust search or filter options to actually find a suitable recipe; an e-commerce site with so many pop-ups it couldn’t be navigated.
Even if all team members aren’t designing or contributing to e-commerce pages, or a stand-alone shopping app, user experience principles and even features can be applied across many mediums. Perhaps a seamless experience with an address validation dropdown when inputting a billing address leads to ideas for auto-fill within an internal form. Even just the reminder of “does this work on mobile” continues to be a necessary question at every step. When my team shared their findings, one Chrome-using designer frustratingly noted that a website checkout only worked in Safari, and they only remembered to check that after the item was already sold out. A good reminder to us for our QA checks.
Occasionally, we could commiserate with some of the designers (“oof, that functionality is hard!”) but often we were already brainstorming how to apply these learnings to our products and platforms.
STAND-UP EXERCISE
Ask the team to be on the lookout for awesome or terrible digital UX/UI experiences they run into in their personal or professional lives. Perhaps while holiday shopping, or doing research, or just going throughout their day - be mindful of times of frustration or times of ease in a digital setting. Bring those examples to stand-up, being prepared to drop links and screenshots in the chat or sharing your screen if the experience can be duplicated. Discuss what could improve, or how we could bring the best of these experiences to our own products and platforms.