UX Inspecting 01 — Yet another approach how to handle error messages more subtly in your app

This is a very first post of my own series regarding to usability testing of some random web/mobile applications. I decided to make this under an outsider perspective which means any solution provided will be with no data backed up.

First at all, let’s look at the Great Design circle principle (mentioned in Data-driven vs. data-informed design in enterprise products by Alastair Simpson @ Atlassian):

So without the green circle (essentially telling you WHAT is happening), we will, in the whole series, focus more heavily to other 2 ones which actually tell you WHY and HOW something is going its way.

OK. It’s show time! The application under testing today is a web application for financial policies comparison, one of fastest growing fintech startup in Southeast Asia, coming from Singapore, it’s GoBear.

The core question today: How you feel when running into an error message during time using an application that prevents you from doing something you really want? Annoyed? Angry? Or at the end, I bet you will likely find that limitation a big reason to switch to another similar app.

In such cases, I regard the app is not affording well to its end-user’s needs. Take following screenshot of GoBear app as an example:

At the first glance, you can find a logic bug which is indicating an incorrect text in the error message. It should read ‘… three times’ instead of ‘… twice’. And that’s it. Fix the text and then we will survive through the first fight.

But, hold on! There must be something else we are missing here.

Error should only occur when we can’t afford doing something for end-users hence somehow indicating our known issue or limitation of the app.

EMPATHY puts myself in end-user shoes. So I wonder, as a user, if there is any reason for me to fall into this situation and what if it happens very frequently? It must be something to do with how we input data into the form that leads user to this erroneous situation where there are duplicate records.

Let me form my own hypothesis: “Is that because they are extracting the same content from other handy sources such as hand paper or sheet which displays spending items row by row. So there is likely, for instance 3 rows, for traveling on 3 different places?”

Practically, you now imagine the situation where users have at the left, the source of his financial plan, such as an excel sheet having a table of what he’s gonna to spend in 1 year. And at the right side, GoBear app with a default form having default ‘fields’. And as an inertia, he keeps copying one row from the left and pasting it to a field in the right until he figures out that is not possible. In other ways, the app is not able to calculate if there are duplicate records on one category.

In the meantime, if you are an insider who can access to the data, collect these metrics:

• how much or often an end-user gets into this situation?
• how many times this error triggers to put into place?
• is there a repetitive pattern for this behaviour?

If the rate/number is high, it seems like the UI was not designed well for the case. Otherwise, read the rest of the article for learning purpose.

And now my GUT FEELING is in place to figure out a more radical solution beyond just fixing the text, it should be to fix the way to handle this case better. But how?

Experiment:

1. Remove entirely the error message in this case.
2. Error should only occur when we can’t afford doing something for end-user hence somehow indicating our weakness or limitation of the app. If there is any, I’d recommend a warning like ‘you are choosing 2 items for one category’ or better a preview of all selection.
3. If one category is selected more than one, aggregate the numbers. Like example above, I want to spend $1,500 for dining and $1,550 for traveling per month.
4. How to introduce new feature to end-users. Use existing way: instructional overlay hint.

Advance feature to brainstorm and collect data enough before implementing it: Import a sheet file for comparison. A cool idea huh, possible?

That’s it. That is how I came up with an innovative solution for a simple logic issue. Though we already know that errors are way to educate users how to use the app properly and avoid misleading user to the wrong way but if you have the strong empathy in attempt to understanding users behaviour, why they keep going that ‘wrong way’, you are on half way recognizing a solution to turn it around.

Hope you enjoy reading the article!

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About the author: Pop is currently working as Senior Product Manager at WebOnyx, LLC where he focuses much on customer experiences, user engagement, product metrics analytics, product launching and market research. He is also an independent innovation consultant who spent his free time learning and inspecting UX issues across web/mobile applications. If you have an application that needs an innovation solution, reach him at tntphuoc@outlook.com.