Frustrating UX: The UX researcher’s curse

I’m not sure if others working in UX can relate or is it just me?! But my phone gallery is full of screenshots of frustrating User Experiences I have encountered. I can get easily wound up by the smallest of things that I know could be quick to fix if only the right people knew about them. For example, in the past week alone I have collected these moments of frustration:

DELIVEROO

Placing a Deliveroo order for COLLECTION and receiving a message about turning on Notifications which was clearly tailored to orders set to be delivered.

In this moment, when presented with the option to ‘Get notified when my rider’s on the way’, I panicked that I had done something wrong and would have to wait an hour for delivery rather than the 15 minutes I had expected by collecting it myself.

Whilst Deliveroo is set up predominantly for deliveries, pick-up is an option, and this use case needs to be better supported in their messaging.

TOO GOOD TO GO

Trying out Too Good To Go for the first time, a service that looks to rescue good food from going to waste, I thought I had completed my first order.

The message ‘You’re a hero! Thanks for saving a meal from going to waste’ made me think it had all gone through successfully, however the only way to close this message was to select ‘Maybe later’. This made me question whether the order was in fact confirmed or not, and whether by clicking ‘Maybe later’ I would be in fact postponing the order and indicating I had changed my mind.

COLLECTION POT

Making a donation on Collection Pot, I was presented with the option to leave a message. It is often difficult to find the right words in certain situations and having written and rewritten the message, I thought I would give the AI Suggest tool a go.

I had expected that it would take the words I had written and reword or elaborate on the points I had made.

My original message was very simply ‘Thinking of you all and sending much love x’. However, the AI suggestion tool took this and went with a message starting ‘In the tapestry of life, our connection stands out as a unique thread, weaving through moments of understanding and support…’

Needless to say, I didn’t want to go with this option, however it had overwritten my original message and there was no way to undo it. I was worried it would save and submit the message as I frantically deleted the AI generated message letter by letter.

NEXT

Browsing the Next Sale for homeware bargains, I stumbled upon a number of strange product descriptions. One such example is the product labelled simply as ‘Joules’ with the size options Double, King and Super King, made out of ‘100% No Composition Required’ along with a picture of a blue fascinator.

Whilst this is quite an extreme example, there were a number of incidents where a product description such as ‘Ochre Dining Bench’, did not match with the image of a Blue Dining Bench. In these situations, it would be very confusing as to what to expect from the final product if you were to proceed with the order.

I’m not sure what I am hoping to gain by collecting these moments of UX frustration, as I rarely do anything like reaching out to the companies to remedy them, but maybe in that millisecond of capturing that screenshot it feels like I am taking action and it’s been quite therapeutic to share them with you in this article.

I guess my top tips from this little tale would be, if you are designing products and services:

• Keep using the service and testing the experience for yourself. You’ll no doubt stumble upon these little gems and identify ‘Quick wins’ to improve the experience.
• Take a holistic approach to map and consider all scenarios and contexts to ensure less common use cases are also supported such as in the Pick-up scenario with Deliveroo.
• Think about how you collect and record incidents of UX frustration. Is there a way for users to report issues, how do you record issues you find yourself?