A Product Manager's Opinion on "User Error"

An article we liked from Thought Leader Olivia Belitsky:

Frustrated Users? Their Errors Are Your Fault.

Here’s how to create intuitive user experiences. Frustrated Users

For two years, I started every workday by watching session recordings from the day before. This exercise let me see my product through my user’s eyes. I began with the highest-friction sessions, taking notes of bugs and areas of improvement.

4 WAYS TO CREATE AN INTUITIVE USER EXPERIENCE

  1. Review and reduce the length of blocks of text on your pages.
  2. In a multi-step flow, chunk your experience into distinct steps.
  3. Use clear and direct error messages.
  4. Ensure your experience meets accessibility requirements.

But I fell into a terrible habit. Often, I would see users struggle with minor inconveniences, like typing a “%” in a text field that was already formatted for percentages, and chalk it off to “user error.” I wouldn’t even put these issues in the backlog because they seemed too minor to be worth addressing.

What I missed is that excellent user experiences hinge on a frictionless experience, and even minor errors pull the user out of the flow of a great experience. Even worse, I put the blame on my user by calling it “user error” when my team built the confusing experience. We blame our users for not intuitively understanding our poorly designed or poorly built products.

So here’s a hot take: There’s no such thing as user error, just poor product experiences. It’s your responsibility as the product manager to provide an intuitive, seamless, and frictionless experience to your user.

Why Intuitive Experiences Matter

There are three core principles that make successful products: they must be necessary, intuitive and delightful. In other words, your product must have tangible value to your user, be seamless to use and spark joy. These principles also build upon each other, in that order. Friction and errors detract from an intuitive experience, which means...

Read the rest of this article at builtin.com...

Thanks for this article excerpt to Olivia Belitsky.

Photo by Yan Krukau

Want to share your advice for startup entrepreneurs?  Submit a Guest Post here.

OC Startup News, OC Startup ResourcesDesign, Guest Post, Olivia Belitsky, product experience, product management, Startup, tech, user experience, UXComment