The myth of the patient and forgiving web user

When it comes to things that should, but don’t work right, I’ll admit I’m one of the most impatient, easily offended people I know. Analytical and idealistic to begin with, my years in the design and usability field have, evidently, only exacerbated these tendencies.

Fortunately for the web, most web users aren’t like me. Instead of becoming instantly irritated with bad design, lazy programming, or poor process flow, they simply shrug, scratch their heads, and muddle through the best they can. They call a friend, or get their 10-year-old kid to help figure it out.

It took me a while to realize this wasn’t just an occasional phenomenom, that most web users don’t expect their online experience to be particularly smooth, easy, or streamlined. In fact, they go online anticipating problems, and that’s ‘just the way it is.’ It takes a fairly significant failure or very high level of confusion for them to abandon what they’re trying to accomplish.

This is a generality, of course, and touches on the larger question of why users expect so little from the web in the first place. But it’s important to note that usability professionals have a built-in allergy to inconvenience the general population lacks. Does this mean we’re too hard on web systems, that we should reduce our level of persnicketyness? Is mediocrity acceptable, as long as the audience is OK with it?

A household lesson in just dealing

Take, for instance, a simple household example of poor design, one that causes user mistakes.

I recently moved into a new house, in which there is a small walk-in closet lit with a ceiling light. The switch for said light is located in a completely unintuitive place - outside the closet on the hinge-side of the door. Since the door can be approached only from the handle-side, turning on the light means reaching across the door.

The expected place for the switch would be on the handle-side of the door, ideally on the inside wall. And that’s exactly where I reach to turn for it, every time I go in the closet. When I don’t find the switch there, I correct myself, step back outside the door, reach across to the hinge-side, and turn on the light.

The error-correction process is annoying, regularly causing me to fume, “What in the world were the original builders thinking?” Obviously, they had very different standards for ease-of-use than I!

When visiting friends and family have occasion to go in the closet, I’ve observed the same error-correction pattern, but minus any railing against the building industry’s lack of appreciation for basic usability. They just deal.

Would it be easier for my visitors if the light switch were moved? Of course. Having the switch in the expected place would remove that error-correction stumble, replacing it with a pre-bundled behavior pattern requiring no thought. But even left as is, it doesn’t drive them crazy and it doesn’t stop them from going into the closet.

A switch by any other name

But that’s my closet. There’s nothing particularly interesting in there, and it’s rarely visited. What if we upped the importance of the switch, and its frequency of use?

Imagine the irate response if the switch were outside the door of a popular restaurant’s restroom. Or outside a hospital’s emergency surgery. In these scenarios, where the switch facilitates behaviors more critical and frequent than finding a pair of shoes, a seemingly small design flaw generates significant consequences. Not to mention ill-will.

A frivolous train of thought, of course, but one that points to a few important concepts:

1. It’s startling to observe how much patience and forgiveness most users have for things that should (by my measure) be irritating as hell.
2. Even patient and forgiving users benefit from having irritants removed.
3. The level of forgiveness you can expect depends partly on the importance of the flaw’s setting, and how often it’s encountered.

Have a usability example where a change of placement or venue impacted the user experience? Let me know!

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