Hello, I’m Dr Dr Dr John NA Brown, consulting UX researcher, and this is a UX mystery.
The Case of the Detour to Nowhere
I was once asked to take on a case for a “Major Professional Networking Company.” Most folks know them for their flagship product, but they have several others. Management on three of those products were concerned about their ‘help’ and ‘support’ services.
Teams of clever people were creating and managing the resources in the Help Center, and another team of well-mannered folks were answering chat messages and phone calls… So why were they getting so many complaints? They’d been unable to resolve the issues in-house. They hired me on a three month contract to design the research that would help them gain the insight they wanted. They ended up extending that contract twice as a result of what we managed to do in the first few months. Let me tell you about our earliest results.
I'd been asked to mentor an in-house UX Designer who was interested in learning about research. Together, we implemented a 5-prong research plan.
1) We reviewed all of their past studies on the topic.
2) We conducted 1-on-1 15-minute interviews with that core team of senior stakeholders. Each one told us which of their subordinates on this project to interview next. Over the first three weeks, we hopped from one to the next like the fleas from Johnathan Swift’s famous poem.
3) We did the same with the engineering leads and their teams, to learn the difference between theory and practice.
4) I ran a full heuristic analysis of “the path to help.”
5) We conducted cognitive walkthroughs and ethnographic interviews with users – vocal ones who had asked for help on more than one occasion, and others chosen based on how often they used the platform. Local folks were interviewed in person, but we also interviewed folks in other countries, conducting the interviews in English, French, and Portuguese.
In total, we uncovered 13 impediments on the user journey, each one confirmed in the cognitive walkthroughs. I then used original cartoons and storytelling to illustrate the neuropsychological and socio-psychological ways in which these impediments affected the users.
Let me give you a couple of examples of the kind of impediments we uncovered. Due to fierce in-house competition for homepage real estate, you couldn’t see a link to the Help Center from the home page without digging through menus. Then there was the strange fact that the Help Center customer service phone number would only be revealed after a user had searched a third time in the same location where it had been invisible twice before. This had been done to slow down the number of calls and to increase the use of the self-service options available in the Help Center.
We showed the stakeholders video clips of the cognitive walkthroughs, to make it clear that every one of those impediments was either a dead-end, a roadblock, or a hurdle on the user journey. In that context, compared to dead-ends and roadblocks, hurdles sound good. If you’re trained and prepared and the hurdles are standardized and predictable, then you can clear them all and race on to the end, right?
But, I reminded them, hurdles don’t belong on a track intended for sprinting, or on an easy garden path, and most of us can agree that a user journey should usually be one or the other.
Taking the analogy even further, I asked them to remember that the user didn’t set out today to get help - that is not the race they came here to run or the path they chose to walk. They were detoured there when their intended path was blocked. In fact, the user journey to getting help is a side track that they’ve been forced to run before they get to go back and run their intended race. At best, a successful race along that detour could only bring you back to the race you had wanted to run in the first place.
We had interviewed a wide range of people, including folks who used the product as their full-time job, and one gentleman who was on a first-name basis with some of the in-house engineers because his feedback had been so consistently helpful to them. The sad truth is that not a single one of those people could manage to access the Help Center.
Clearly displeased with this turn, one of the senior-most stakeholders smiled broadly and suggested that I must be ‘cherry-picking’ - only showing them video clips that reinforce my ideas. All of these hurdles can’t really be all that much of a burden, she said, because the numbers show that loads of people manage to access the Help Center content every day.
My apprentice and I had confirmed that both things were true and, anticipating this line of resistance, we had arranged to present the stakeholders with irrefutable proof of how that was happening, and why it really should be fixed.
Before I explain how it could be true that no one can find the Help Center and yet lots of people are using the contents of the Help Center, I’d like to offer you the chance to come up with the answer on your own. I promise you that all of the clues you need are right there in the story I just told you. In fact, if you put yourself in the shoes of the users facing thirteen hurdles, I daresay that you would probably solve the problem in the very same way that they did.
If that makes this too easy, maybe you can figure out what kind of proof I offered up at the meeting. The clues for that are all there, too.
Once you’ve solved the problem and figured out the proof, please come on back and pick up the story again so I can share the solution we found through our research.
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Welcome back.
Did you figure out that the answer involves the most common tool on the Internet? You’ll remember that a senior stakeholder had just suggested that my research results were mistaken, because a lot of people were successfully accessing the content in the Help Center.
In response, I turned to a quiet but friendly chap at the far end of the table. The second in command of the Help Center’s engineering team had come to the meeting at our request, and he confirmed that every single person who visited any page of Help Center content had gotten there directly from the results page of a Google search.
I hope you enjoyed this UX mystery, and that you'll come back for more.