#008 - Cloudy with a Chance of SaaS
Customer: Friction, Toil, and Invisible Work
Customer
Your customer, as a user of your offering, will encounter challenges along the way. These challenges will create Friction, Toil, and Invisible work for the end users. As technical creators and/or founders, the issues and troubles you seamlessly power through, are exactly the kind of issues that will stop your users, cold, in their tracks. For example, when the next best action isn’t obvious in the User Interface or you repeatedly ask a user to do something that could be automated, you create challenges for them. When you ask your users to learn something new in your offering, and you don’t account for the resultant invisible work, you are making life for your users a lot harder than it needs to be.
Friction
Friction often takes on 3 forms: Emotional, Cognitive, and Interaction as defined by Sachin Rekhi in a 2017 Medium article[1]. Your users are bringing all of themselves in their best and worst ways to their interaction with you. Being human is very hard, and getting harder every day. We often forget that the User Interface (UI) we are delivering is just one of the 100s, or maybe 1000s that a user will interact with on any given day. The user isn’t intimately familiar with your offering. They haven’t lived it the way you have. You are hopefully in a good emotional place while developing and creating it, but the same can not always be said for your users when they are using it. They may not have the patience or smarts that you have, and they are certainly less familiar with all of your product’s capabilities than you are. You can’t fault them for this. Instead, you need to put yourself in their shoes, through research and observation. If you observe and understand the friction your users encounter within your offering, you can begin to design around or remove that friction.
Toil
Any number of items can fall into toil. Forcing the resetting of passwords on a fairly regular schedule is an easy one to eliminate and research has shown it actually makes your systems less secure. Having users use swivel chair integration by requiring cutting and pasting between different systems or browsers, is yet another form of toil. Having people repeat things like re-entering mailing addresses, credit cards, or other information is toil that should be eliminated. If you watch your users for any length of time you will see patterns of repetition between sessions that you should seek to eliminate.
Invisible Work
This is sometimes the hardest to uncover because it is insidious and hidden by definition. It manifests itself when you do, what you think is a simple software update, but requires the reskilling or retraining of your end users to use the new capability. And if you think about it, this also creates work for your documentation, support, and other teams to keep up with the changes. Long setup or signup processes also create invisible work for end users and their support or admin staff. Another one is not giving the next best action or allowing for self-service in/from your application to resolve issues. The last one I’ll mention is the time it takes to get support to resolve an issue. This can just be the time lag in tickets, but could also be the length of time it takes to answer a phone call or chat message. The customer waiting around for this resolution is another form of invisible work.
To combat all 3 of these, Friction, Toil, and Invisible work, one simple tip is all it takes.
1 Tip:
Watch and interview your user/s, you will find tons of greenspace to innovate and minimize Friction, Toil, and Invisible work in your offering.
Thank You
Jim ‘The Designatic’ Tyrrell
[1]
https://medium.com/@sachinrekhi/the-hierarchy-of-user-friction-e99113b77d78