UX, empathy, and birds
What does the Merlin Bird ID app have to do with consumers of healthcare marketing materials? Join me on a long, rambling journey...
I go walk around and look at birds almost every morning; I've become kind of obsessed. If you know anyone who enjoys birding, you've probably heard them talk about the Merlin Bird ID app, which can identify birds by sound. It's fantastic.
From a UX perspective, the app is pretty intuitive and easy to use; nothing complicated or confusing at all. However, to a birder like me, it's clear that the UX folks and designers who created this app are not birders, or they didn't test it the way real birders use it. They did all the normal, correct things from a UX perspective, but they did not think about how people actually go look at birds — what the experience is like, what they feel, what they need.
Here's the biggest example.
In general, we birders hear and see mostly the same group of bird species every day; maybe we confirm them with the Merlin app, maybe we don't bother. We're always hoping to encounter something rare or unknown, but that doesn't happen very often. If you're a birder and you're out in nature and you suddenly hear a rare bird or (even better) a bird you don't recognize, it's a thrilling feeling of delight and excitement; almost panic! You may only have a couple seconds to record and identify this bird before it's gone — and then it may remain a mystery forever. It's very common to miss the opportunity entirely, which can be (I'm not even kidding) kind of heartbreaking.
So you hear that rare/unknown bird call, and now the app comes in. You grab your phone, fumble to unlock it as quickly as possible, open the Merlin app, and hit the big green circle "record" button on the home screen. (It says "Sound" rather than "Record birds" or "Listen for birds," which isn't great, but visually it does the job.) This is a good user experience; the button is huge and bright green and really stands out. You can't miss it; it screams "tap me." Honestly, I'd say they could even make the button twice as big, and that would just be even more helpful to users who are freaking out to quickly determine what this bird is before they miss it.
So you hit the record button, and at this point you interact with the app normally; you listen and watch the app, and hopefully the app shows you what bird(s) you're hearing. Success. When you're done, you press the red "stop" button to stop recording, and at that point you probably hit the sleep button to make your phone go dark, and maybe you put it back in your pocket.
Here's where it gets interesting, and frustrating.
You continue walking around and enjoying nature, and suddenly you hear another interesting bird. Once again, delight and panic! You grab your phone, quickly unlock it, and since the Merlin app was the last app you used, it's automatically open on-screen. Your panicked brain thinks, "What do I hit to start recording?" and the answer is "green circle." You hit the green circle.
And that's the wrong button.
On that screen you left off on, the green circle button actually plays back the previous sound file you recorded. Now you have to realize your mistake, fumble to stop the playback, and then scramble to find the correct button. In fact, there's a green rectangular "Start New Recording" button below; that's the one you want — but your brain was looking for the green circle! To make matters worse, this "Start New Recording" button may be way down below a bunch of pre-recorded bird calls, so you have to scroll to get to it. Scrolling is fine, but not when you're A) in a panic, and B) faced with just one button that looks like the button you want. (Separately, you also have the option of tapping the back button to go back to the home screen, which has the huge green "Sound" button.)
The extra couple seconds that all this takes means there's a very good chance you're going to miss the bird you wanted to record. It's a really frustrating experience.
You'd think this frustration would help train your brain to not screw this up more than once or twice, but, in my case, and the case of other people I've talked to, that's not what happens. I've made this mistake dozens of times, over many months. Not every time, but plenty of times. I'm convinced the euphoric panicky feeling of hearing a new bird turns off the logical part of one's brain that would say, "Remember, you've learned from previous mistakes, you need to hit the green rectangular button, not the green circle button."
Obviously part of the problem is the lack of consistency: sometimes you need the green circle, sometimes you need the green rectangle — it all depends on whether you've just opened the app or if you've already recorded something and are now using it for the second time. It's a strange UX situation that I haven't seen very many times in my career: different rules based on where you are in a sequence. Weird! And definitely not intuitive.
Testing is good. Good-quality testing is better.
Of course I don't have the resouces to do a big user study on this, but I have asked (... counting on fingers...) four other people who use the Merlin app, and they've all reported having this exact same problem! And, like me, they only have this problem when they're in a hurry to identify a bird that they're excited about; something rare or unknown to them. We don't get this user error if we're just recording the typical boring birds (no offense, birds).
I'm convinced if you did a user test that removes the emotional element, and the time-sensitive element, a group of test subjects would have no problem selecting the correct button(s) every time; they're clearly marked with intuitive icons and/or meaningful text. And that's probably exactly the kind of testing that the app development team did.
They may have tested the app with non-birder volunteers in a lab — or they may have even tested it out in the wild, with real birders. The critical difference is (I'm assuming) they just let the birders record and identify typical birds, to test the user flow; I doubt they waited until something rare or special came around, because that can take days/weeks/months — but if they had, they'd see it's a very different experience for the user.
So, in this testing scenario which I have completely imagined in my mind, they would have tested for a low-stress use of the app, but not a high-stress use of the app. (You could even call these low stakes and high stakes.) That high-stress use is by far the more important one. That's the situation where you need to be able to use the app quickly in order to get information on a bird that's important to you — or you'll possibly miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Whew, that's a lot of words for something that's not very consequential! It's just birds, I know! But, like, if you enjoy birds, you'll get it.
What's the solution?
Easy!
1. Make the green circle consistent for "Record." (Also, change the label "Sound" to "Record birds" or "Listen for birds.")
2. Don't use a green circle for anything else. (And, let's consider users who are colorblind; don't use any dark circle button for anything else.)
3. I'd also put the record button on every single screen of the app, in the same place; always at the top or bottom. Any time you wake up the app, no matter what screen you were on before, your finger knows exactly where to go to start recording.
I feel like I can absolutely guarantee these three things would completely eliminate the problem I described above, and lead to happier users. The issue was that this very specific (but important!) problem was simply never considered.
So, as digital agency professionals, how does all of this relate to our work?
It's important to have real empathy for users
When designing any kind of digital experience — an app, a website, an email, a banner ad, etc — it's important that we not only ask ourselves, "Is this user experience clear and logical?" but also, "What are users actually experiencing while they're using this?" Now I'm (finally!) bringing this topic around to my industry, healthcare advertising, aka pharma. When we're designing experiences for patients, we need to consider the possible things they're dealing with. Not just: what information do they need, and what are the interactive things we can provide to give it to them? But also: what are they feeling? What are their concerns? What factors might be obstacles in allowing them to get what they need? What are the physical factors that might figure into this? What are the emotional factors?
An easy example of what not to do, which I mentioned in my article, Many people have visual impairments, is tiny text on a website for people with migraines. This may have tested just fine for typical users, or even with users who sometimes experience migraines. But if they'd tested the site on people who experience migraines, while they're experiencing a migraine, they would've gotten very different results.
All of this is a very sophisticated kind of problem, but it can be really fascinating to work through — especially with real users.
Over the years, while observing user tests of pharma websites with real patients, a few different times I've heard a patient express some variation of this kind of statement: "I'm too preoccupied with my health concerns to take the time to figure out this feature on this website. I just want the info I'm looking for, as easily as possible."
This type of example regarding patients can also be extended to HCPs who are simply in a hurry. Cramming a few minutes of research time between appointments is not the same type of experience as a leisurely testing session in a lab with volunteer subjects.
If we assume that many consumers of our healthcare marketing materials have experiences like this — with distractions, obstacles, or time constraints that we can't replicate in a user test — how can we use that idea to inform our work?
Something I say all the time is that empathy is the most important trait an agency professional can have. Thinking about our users as real human beings informs our work and makes our work better — better for them, and better for our clients.
– 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.