How User Friendly is Christmas?

Annette Ek, one of our usability consultants examines how user friendly our Christmas customs really are.
In theory user friendly things are effective, efficient and pleasurable to use. Christmas is one of those things that is supposed to bring joy into our lives and be an overall pleasant experience but how user friendly is Christmas really?

Santa has done a great job keeping children in mind when designing Christmas, but seems to have almost entirely ignored another equally important user group - the adults. Christmas puts this user group under a lot of pressure resulting in stress and frustration. Tasks mainly performed by children, such as opening gifts and writing wish lists, are pretty straight forward and enjoyable. However, tasks performed mainly by adults, such as Christmas shopping and over eating, cause great grief, and could clearly be improved. The internet has somewhat eased the issue of Christmas shopping, but still leaves much to be desired for last minute purchases. Over eating is still a major problem that to date has not seen any successful solutions. Displaying images of fat Santas has not had a major impact on the public.

However, user research is something that Santa values highly. He has an established user research team consisting of several hundred little helpers working throughout the year in order to establish user requirements. In Finland Santa carries out prototype testing pre launch every year as part of the iterative design process. It is known as "Little Christmas" and takes place on the Saturday before Advent. Traditionally Santa's little helpers deliver small gifts from Santa's Lapland workshop to Finnish houses by throwing the gifts through the front door and running away as quickly as they can. This gives the helpers the opportunity to review and amend the procedure prior to the launch.

Something Santa has succeeded in doing is reducing memory load, by the extensive use of Christmas wish lists and other means of displaying "knowledge in the world" such as the Advent Calendar and early Christmas window displays.

Visibility is an important part of usability and in this aspect the English Christmas leaves much to be desired. Dropping Christmas gifts through the chimney at night is not a very transparent procedure. It is much more visible in some other European countries where Santa actually pays a visit to all the houses at Christmas Eve, and even allows himself a little dance with the children before continuing on his journey.

A consistent mental model of the Christmas procedure is also important as a mismatch can cause great confusion. For example, imagine if this year Santa built his mental model on the belief that "it is the thought that counts" and your children founded theirs on the principle "the bigger the better". Your Christmas is unlikely to be pleasurable. However, when errors do occur, for example the right gifts are collected from Santa's workshop but delivered to the wrong home (issues in the gulf of execution), it is crucial that such actions can be reversed. One solution is for Santa to actually hand out the receipts as well as the gifts so that users could take control of the errors and correct them themselves.

You might have noticed a slight inconsistency in this text - who IS responsible for the Christmas gifts, is it Santa and his team or the adults? An issue that still manages to confuse a great number of children and adults alike!