Show Me What's Available, Not What's Not

Many people love watching movies in large groups, especially college grads and families. In group booking, users mostly prefer sitting side by side. If the user needs to book 8 tickets and only 4 seats are remaining, what does the app show?

The app above shows the seatmap with remaining seats.

Is there a better way? 

Yes!

Can we engage the user by suggesting them to the immediate next show where the tickets are avaiable? 

Yes!

Why wouldn't the app do that? 

Because it's hard.

The difference between failure and success is the effort it takes to work on the hard stuff.

Web Re-direction

Talk about any passport/visa application website and people start to sweat with stress. The trauma of using these websites stems from the fact that some of them were built as lower school summer projects. At least, that is how they appear.

Here is one visa application website.

This website appears to have many fabulous features (read as traumatic features).

1. Registered users can remain registered only for 30 days. The account is deactivated thereafter. A frequent business traveler will hate this feature, given the mind-boggling revenues that business travel generates in travel domain.
2. Registration website is a different website, although it appears to be the same until you realize it's not
3. Once registration is complete, the user cannot proceed with visa appointment. There is not even a URL. User has to re-type the visa appointment URL and proceed

Web redirection, if broken, is a nightmare for non-tech savvy users.

Web redirection, if seamless, encourages users to spread the word about how wonderful it is to use it.

Which website are you?

Cross versus Tick Symbols for Checkboxes

Sometimes, checkboxes can be funny. It looks simple on the outside with just two states - cross or tick symbols. Yet, based on the label associated with them, it eases or complicates user's perception.

Consider visa application form for Schengen Visa. Earlier, visa applicants saw 'X' symbol when checkboxes were selected. Does 'X' mean that option is included or excluded? It can be confusing.

In recent form, they changed 'X' symbol to tick mark. Does tick mark mean that the option is included? Hell, Yes!

One Click One Tap One Eye One Thumb

Luke Wroblewski conceived the One Thumb One Eyeball heuristic. People use their smartphones on the couch, in the toilet, while walking along the hallway, or even while standing and waiting. Such contexts force one hand, one thumb and one eye use rather than using two hands, multiple fingers and a pair of focused eyes.

Busy people crave for one tap check-ins, one click signups, and faster goal accomplishments in general.

Browser extensions are painfully time-consuming to install. Product Hunt designed a 'One-Click Install' that speeds up this process.

How delightful and fast!

What's Your Secret Question?

Secret Questions feature a second layer authentication method followed only by the infamous Password as first layer. The usual questions are, Which is your birthplace, What is the name of your first pet, What is your mother's maiden name, What is your favorite color and so forth. If you are like me whose taste changes often, it is difficult to remember right answers for questions related to color for example. Depending on my mood and seasons, my favorite color changes. 

Image Credits: A forgotten twitter user

As if Secret Questions feature wasn't complicated enough, some website spent their innovating thinking on creative secret questions.

How many cousins do you have? 

Oh, the last time, I counted, there were 39 cousins 

What is the fastest speed you have ever driven?

40 Kms/Hr. Isn't it fast enough for an unskilled driver like me?

What is your ideal weight, in your view?

Well, I would love to be 58. Oh! 66 is my lucky number :)

God, screw the secret questions!

Facebook misses you

Facebook loves you. Facebook misses you.

Facebook misses you so much that when you decide to leave, it asks for feedback. If you say that you didn't find facebook useful, it points out that you are not doing a great job finding friends and hence use 'Friend Finder' feature to make it useful. Oh! The Help Center is useful too, in their view.

What you do when your users are leaving your product/platform tells a lot about whether they'll come back or not.

What do you tell your users, when they are about to leave?

Offers That Don't Have Anything to Offer

Frequent window shopping users use online shopping as a good getaway from routine life. The addiction of constantly watching what's new online also tempts them to mark a few products which they may need in future or are planning to buy. For such users, even a tiny offer at the drop of the hat tempts them to buy stuff.

This e-commerce player displays 'View Offers' for most items. When users click on the link to claim their offer, a message is displayed, "This product is already at its best price". 

If the product is already at its best price, why are you fooling users to think that there are offers?

Mindful Ads in Mobile Apps

Duolingo is a great app to learn new languages. For most part, its a free app. It takes a lot for app developers to keep their app free, while they find means to make some money.

While most apps ruthlessly slap advertising content on users, Duolingo found a friendly way to let users tolerate useless ads. It took a simple, "This ad helps keep education free."

A mindful ad, in a long long time!

When Ads Take Over Users' Needs

A website I recently bumped into has the tagline, "Why You Should Join Us?" followed by many options as shown in the picture below:

The message appeared to say, You should join us to learn about sponsoring us, follow us on Twitter, Linked In and other places where you can waste more time, and hey, you can also jump onto our closed groups on facebook, slack and other places.

Great serviceability is not about serving great ads, but helping users accomplish their goals. 

Next time, you ask someone to join your tribe, ask yourself, Why should they join you?

Wind Shields from Wellington

The City of Wellington in New Zealand leaves you with awe and wonder. One can experience spring in the morning, summer in the afternoon, rain in the evening and winter at night. Very few cities in the world have the privilege of four kinds of weather packed into a single day.

Additionally, Wellington is windy most part of the day. The winds are so strong that they knock people off the pavement with utmost ease. This is especially harder when people stand still to cross the roads. 

To battle the unusually strong winds, the Government has installed windshields in most places. People when planning to cross the road, escape into these tiny enclosures as they wait for the green signal to cross the road.

A simple, yet very helpful implementation for the citizens of Wellington. Bravo!

Just In Time Contextual Offers

Flight booking websites and mobile apps push great discounts to users' inboxes and mobile devices, attracting them to make a booking. Users landing on such a website/app, end up scouting for discount that more often than not, disappears the moment user lands on that website/app. The users leave disappointed and angry.

Google Flights does exactly opposite of that. If a user attempts to book a flight, the app suggests that there is a better discount on a different date, if the user is flexible with dates. The message, Return 1 day earlier is a decent warning if a user chooses this option. 

Google Flights website also allows users to track prices using Track Prices feature. 

If not for contextual offers, what else does a user need?

Cutting the Crap - Meaningful Shopping

Many e-commerce companies have come up in last 10 years. There was a time when we knew only about Walmart and TESCO. Today, we have Amazon, Carre Four, e-Bay, Sainsbury, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Alibaba and many more. While few companies have gone for acquisitions or mergers, many others are competing against each other. As part of that competition, they want to attract users via price wars. One such game is special sales events. Big Billion Day, Wednesday Sale, Christmas Sale, Festival Offers, Great Savings Week are few of the many sales happening throughout the year. 

This week, Amazon India is running the Great Savings Week. For all obvious reasons, a promotional email landed in my inbox. 

I wanted to buy this book The Doodle Revolution for a long time. The only reason I backed out is that this book has shipping fee plus import fee, which was a lot of money.

There are several problems with this promotional email:
1. This email nudges me to buy this book, without telling me if this book has any offers 
2. This email tells me there are discounts on books, but doesn't tell me if this book is part of the deal (similar to 1 above)
3. This email doesn't tell me how much discount I might get

As a shopper, I have to now go to books section from the email, check out the offers for books, identify if this book is eligible for that discount and then place an order if I like it.

Legacy e-commerce giants are sitting on piles of data from over 30+ years. Can't we use this data to provide a relevant and lucrative offer to the user? 

Yes. We Can. We Must.  

Pick Up Where You Left

Microsoft Word is used by many users for documentation. A big challenge while creating a new document or editing an existing document is to switch between sections to make changes. Another bigger challenge is to remember where you were, within the document, the previous time you used the document.

In MS Office 2013 version, MS Word introduced a new feature, Pick up where you left. This helps you go to exact location where you were at the time of closing the document.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind 

Users are doing multi-tasking all the time (although multi-tasking is a myth). They rarely remember what they say, think, or do. If the task is important enough, it comes to your mind again and again - psychologists call it Call Rehearsal. If the task is not important enough, one cannot rely on the knowledge in the head to remind you at the right time.

When you are going about your day to day life, hustling kids to school, reaching office on time, picking up your spouse from office to home and getting daily chores done, remembering where you left off on a word document is the least thing to remember.

External reminders are not just helpful, but necessary!

Inconsistent Behavior on Multi-Channel Products

Many organizations are building mobile responsive websites to give better experience to users. Linked In is one of them. While they are giving a good experience to mobile web and app users, they have failed to provide consistent experience on multiple channels for some features.

People you may know

People you may know feature suggests new profiles to connect with. Consider how this is designed for mobile website and mobile app.

Mobile Website

On mobile website, each profile has two buttons - Remove and Connect. 

What does Remove mean? Does it remove this connection from People you may know list? When user taps on 'Remove', the message is, "Request sent to <User> Dismissed". The user is left wondering whether he sent the request or not, when in fact, he wanted to NOT send the request. 

There are two problems here:

1. Remove button is confusing

2. Message displayed when user taps on Remove is confusing

Desktop Website

Let's head to the desktop website.

It's the same feature People you may know. But, 'Dismiss' button appears here. Thankfully, Dismiss conveys a better message. 

Consistency Heuristic

Within a product (Linked In), each element (in this case, the button) needs to be consistent with comparable elements in the same system. 

Users access products on multiple channels depending on the context. If they don't have an app, they quickly get onto the mobile website on their mobile device. If they are using a laptop/desktop at work, they access it using a web browser. If they have an app, they want to continue with their flow (on the web browser), using the app. 

Multiple channels must enable users to continue their 'FLOW' when users move from one channel to another rather than confuse them.

How do you deal with multiple channels?

Trip Itineraries - A Story of Auto-Magical Import

A business/leisure trip is not complete without a pre-planned itinerary. Few questions arise:

• Is web or mobile check-in open?

• Can I choose my favorite window seat?

• What time is the flight?

• How do I get to the airport?

• Which gate and terminal should I head to?

• Which is the next stopover?

• When is my next flight?

• How long is the layover to my next flight?

• Again, Which gate and terminal should I head to?

• Can I do something interesting during the layover?

• This list never ends. A first-time traveler on an international trip could write a book on his travel fears. 

Can a user get this itinerary automatically based on 6-digit PNR number present on the flight ticket?

A product called Check My Trip from Amadeus does just that. 

The user is asked to forward the booking confirmation email to trips@checkmytrip.com. The product then builds an itinerary intelligently with no user intervention. The end result: An auto-imported trip list as displayed below. Almost magical.

Does your product do magic too?

What Does Your Product Sell - Ads or Useful Information?

You are booking a multi-city trip on any airline website. In some cities, there are long stopovers. What do most airline websites do? They put advertisements like, 'Book Hotel', 'Visit Museum' and so forth. 

Emirates doesn't sell ads in this context. Emirates warns you that the stopover is longer than usual, that you should have a valid visa to get out of the airport and that departure and arrival airports are different.

How many airlines have this meta-layer information about the flight trips and passengers? ALL OF THEM.

How many airlines apply their empathic brains to help passengers make better decisions? FEW OF THEM.

Where does your airline fall into?

The Trauma Of Government Websites

The EPFO was offline for several decades. A few years ago, they attempted to go online and digital. A brave move for the working population India had at the time. The internet generation of people glorified this move.

Today, EPFO has a website where users can look up their Provident Fund account balance and avail loans or other services. However, if a user needs to download member passbook, he has to navigate to a different website and follow a series of steps.

Many government run websites are unusable for internet-savvy users and too complex for remaining users. What does this lead to? Users take the traditional route and queue up at offices.

Whether The Weather Is Visible Or Not

Traveling to touristy places can be daunting at times, due to unfriendly weather conditions. Thankfully, many weather apps help users weather their mind storms by giving real-time day by day weather forecast.

AccuWeather is used by most third-party websites/mobile apps to plugin weather information. The website highlights weather for 'Today'. The month dropdown is in the background and prevents the user from browsing weather for any particular month.

Can users weather this experience? 

Of course, not.

You Need to Cool Down Before You Are Hot Again

Place an iPhone in 45 degrees (celsius) and watch what happens.

iPhone warns you about it and asks you to cool it down.

Forgiving designs forgive users for their mistakes, errors, failures. 

Forgiving designs help users recover gracefully and quickly. 

Forgiving designs treat humans as they are!

Navigation Made Easy

Websites have URLs all over the place, especially if they are e-commerce or branding sites. The usual process to open an URL from a web page is:
1. If the URL is a hyperlink, click on the URL, to open a new page (within same tab / new tab)
2. If the URL is in plain text, copy+paste the URL in a browser press enter key and wait for the page to load

Too many steps!

If the URL is in plain text, this website provides an option, 'Go to <URL>' instead of forcing the user with multiple steps.

Would you prefer fewer steps?