In my career as a user experience designer and researcher, I’ve interviewed or tested scores of end users through the years, and I see a trend show up over and over. Users have often told me that they KNOW that how they “do” something is not the “right way” or that they were aware of a new feature or method that was available to them, but they never change or adopt the new offering. This was never tied to a particular demographic or class of user, but was a consistent pattern of behavior that I observed no matter what the product or topic being studied.
So, what is the root cause of such behavior. Obviously, I’m not a mind reader, and at first I thought this topic was something that was worth further study (maybe even worth of writing a book on it) and I may look into this further (especially as part of my job will soon involve figuring out how to get past the mental barriers I am discussing here).
My interest in this is piqued even more by the observation that trying something new or different in a piece of software is just the tip of the iceberg – people stop themselves from trying new things, taking risks, etc. throughout their lives. For a good analysis of this type of behavior in the creative area, I recommend The War of Art, a fine book by Steven Pressfield.
So, though I may never have “enough” to write that book on this topic, I have gathered some observations that I think explains some of the behaviors I’ve noted. I use the general term “resistance” here – Resistance to change, resistance to new features, resistance to moving tasks from one “place” to another, etc. Here’s some causational factors:
Fear of change
Change is scary to lots of people, and when we introduce a completely revised UI that varies greatly from the interaction models they expect to see we often get a fear response from the participants we are surveying. It’s not that they would not be interested in the new design, it’s just the immediate response is negative because it’s “different.”
Habit
If I had to guess, I would say that we are all creatures of habit to some extent – some more than others. I have seen many instances where users, shown a different way to do a task (one that they themselves acknowledge is better than the way they accomplish the task currently) are resistance to the new method. “It’s the way I’ve always done things.” These participants, when interviewed, say they will “give it a try” when the new design is implemented. Don’t count on it.
Apathy
This is closely aligned to the habitual behavior, detailed above, but this is when the user just doesn’t have enough emotional energy invested in the task to change how he or she goes about doing it. This is usually when the task is a “rote” one, which varies little from day to day (or month to month). Getting past such apathy is a daunting challenge.
Ignorance
Many times I have exposed users to functionality that they can already DO in their existing systems, and they express surprise at the capability. A great example of this, outside my own designs, is when Microsoft redesigned the UI for their Office suite. One of the most requested features – the ability to watermark a document – had been there the entire time, but the redesign placed the control in a more prominent place based on the context of what the user was attempting to do. It quickly became the most frequently used function in Office.
In this case, the user is not resisting the option – they know there should be a way to do the task, they just don’t know how. The design has failed the user, and unnecessary frustration often occurs.
Overload
Many UIs (including a few that I have had a hand in designing) are really, well, too much. I had the opportunity to design an interactive voice response system at Cingular Wireless, and what I quickly discovered was that cognitive overload was a Clear and Present Danger when it comes to creating such a system – users quickly got overwhelmed if you provided too many prompts, especially if the prompts did not match the “mental model” of what they were expecting or trying to do.
The same lesson applies to UI design – if the UI you provide users is too cluttered or has distracting elements, you will see many “give up” because it’s “too much” – to these users, the cluttered design makes figuring things out WORK – and you have lost them.
Closing
How do we “get past” these barriers as UI and user experience designers? Well, first off, we need to remind ourselves that we only design part of the experience – the stuff that, usually, is on a screen that people interact with. The user’s mental models on how things should work, the physical environment – all of that STUFF – we can’t control. Most of the time we can’t even influence the hardware that users pull on, push and tug on to access/use our designs. So we need to accept that there is going to be some natural “resistance” to anything we offer, because of these factors outside our control.
What is important to do is understand when such resistance may occur, and keep the above causes in mind. It will help us male a more focused design that will increase adoption of the systems we design and make our end users (and our bosses) happier.