My most hated UX/QA failure in recent years
I bet you will recognize this experience:
You arrive at a website's homepage, you click in the search bar at the top, you begin typing a few letters, but you're interrupted by a pop-up that's asking you to sign up for something. Absolute rage. To whomever designed this experience, I wish the very worst of fates for you.
The thing is, of course, no one really designed that exact experience; no one imagined precisely that user flow. And that's the problem. I'm shocked at how often I encounter this exact issue, usually on commerce sites, but it could be anywhere. There are so many levels of failure involved.
Maybe the pop-up was a band-aid, added after the website was already live, and no one did any proper testing. Creative designed the pop-up, UX looked at it and gave their input on the pop-up itself, and dev programmed it into the site.
Maybe the QA team tested it, but they failed to account for the fact that many users would arrive at the site and immediately begin typing in the search. (UX should've caught this too.) They may have just tested the pop-up essentially in a vaccuum, by visiting the homepage, waiting for the pop-up to appear (because they, unlike real users, knew that it would), and then they just tested the pop-up's functionality, missing the broader problem completely. This is what I would call a lack of empathy in testing. You can imagine how they got there: "We've added a pop-up. QA team, test it." "QA has tested the pop-up and it works."
So, sure, you're testing the various bits and making sure they function as designed/programmed, but you're failing to take into account real users and real user flows. It's a lack of consideration of the big picture. You've added something that you thought would be good — because who doesn't love signing up for more things? ugh — but you've made the site worse. I personally find this experience annoying enough to bounce out of a site and find what I need elsewhere.
If you've read some of my articles or heard any of my talks, you probably know that I'm of the firm opinion that pop-ups are almost always a bad thing. And anything that interrupts the user from what they're trying to do is absolutely a bad thing. Take away their control, and they're going to be unhappy. They are there on their terms, not yours.
Testing with real users is the way to catch these problems! I'm a huge proponent of user testing, and we don't see it happen often enough in my field. I've often encountered huge resistance to the idea of arranging user testing — due to the time and expense involved — but I guarantee you it's always worthwhile, for exactly the reasons I'm talking about in this article. I feel like so many of the things we do result in us throwing our client's money away, and testing is the opposite of that.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.