Stop Worrying About User Experience

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STOP WORRYING ABOUT USER EXPERIENCE
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Ill never forget a conversation I had with a
customer many years ago about how success would
be measured at the end of a proof of concept. At
the time I laughed at the answer, but looking
back on that conversation I realize they were
right. Their goal We want our users to be
happy. They knew something then that I have
since learned - it doesnt necessarily matter how
fast or slow a page loads, if the user thinks it
is fast and they arent frustrated by the
experience then you have a good user experience
AKA happy users. The users perception is more
important than the actual experience. There is a
lot of talk about wanting to create a good user
experience, but how much of the user experience
is within our control? The problem with web
performance metrics is they focus on objective
time or clock time as this is measurable and can
be used for comparisons. We focus on time to
first byte (TTFB), start render, document
complete and more recently speed index. These
are all valuable objective metrics for comparison
but what is missing is the subjective experience
on the passage of time, known as psychological
time. The perception of the end user can be more
important than the objective measure of time. In
the web performance world we are focused on
objective time and look for ways to shave
milliseconds off load times, even if the user
wont perceive the page as being faster. Steven
Seow in Designing and Engineering Time The
Psychology of Time and Perception in Software
presents the 20 rulea response time needs to be
20 faster for an end user to perceive it as
being faster. That means if a page takes 5
seconds to load and it is reduced to 4.5 seconds
an end user will not perceive this as being
faster, the page has to load in under 4 seconds
to be perceived as faster. This applies to
whether you want your site to perceived as faster
than a competitors or faster than a previous
version of your own site. To learn more about
objective and psychological time check out Denys
Mishunov's 3-part series in Smashing
Magazine. Not only do people experience time
differently their perception is also influenced
by biases. Everybody is biased and these biases
influence how a user can perceive an experience.
If you think you arent biased thats
a bias-blind spot. Wikipedia has a great list of
cognitive biasesthat include decision making,
belief behavioral biases, social biases, and
memory errors biases.
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A third piece to the user perception puzzle is
people are not always rational, and sadly this
irrationalism impacts our perception of the world
around us. Decisions are often driven more on
emotion than on logical thinking. Think about the
recent billion dollar Powerball jackpot, I dont
play the lottery as I know my chances of winning
are close to zero but that didnt stop me from
buying a ticket for that mega jackpot. The
purchase was driven completely by emotion, logic
had nothing to do with it.
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HOW DO THESE BIASES AND IRRATIONAL BELIEFS
INFLUENCE THE USER EXPERIENCE? Anchoring
Bias First experiences are imprinted on our
brain. As the saying goes you never get a second
chance to make a first impression. If the first
visit to a web site is bad this will be
remembered forever. We tend to rely too heavily
on the first piece of information we acquire
about a subject. Distinction Bias People are bad
at comparing things. People may not be able to
judge which site is faster than another
especially when viewed at different times. We
tend to find more differences when comparing
items simultaneously. Negativity Bias
Selective Perception Negative events have a
greater impact on an individual than a positive
experience does. If a user visits your site 99
times but 1 time they have a negative experience
they will remember that negative experience more
than the 99 times they had a positive experience.
This may then lead them to expect a negative
experience on future visits. Weber-Fechner
Law The inability to compare small differences.
When shaving milliseconds off a response time,
users may not notice any difference as the
just-noticeable difference (JND) has not been
reached. An improvement of 500 ms will be more
noticeable on a page loading in 2 seconds than a
page loading in 6 seconds. WHERE TO GO FROM
HERE? We have a plethora of metrics to measure
the user experience but very few ways to measure
the users perception. There have been a number
of tricks that have been utilized over the
years to make the page appear to load faster, the
challenge is investing time and resources into
making a change that feels faster without any
way to back up the feeling with data. What we
need is a way to measure the users perceived
experience which is subjective and driven by
emotion.
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