More useful notification/error message
Today, I got 2 kinds of messages that annoyed me:
Error message on Yahoo! mail
Notification email of a bill
Error message on Yahoo! mail
My mailbox was temporarily unavailable. Ok, I get that even the big boys sometimes have hiccups.
Then I saw the part that annoys me. It says something like error type 3 ( I don't remember the exact cryptic message), then a link to learn more how to troubleshoot.
Oh great! It's error type 3, not type 129374. Who cares?! I'm not debugging this.
I just want to check my emails. It was working before and I didn't do anything differently this time around. It's just part of my daily habit.
Asking me to troubleshoot-implied by the presence of that link - makes me feel that it's MY responsibility to make the product work. I didn't break it, why should I fix it?
A better way to handle this is to let me know when it's back up. How? They have my secondary email and phone number that they use for password retrieval, why not use those?
BTW, I got a very similar problem and message from Gmail last week. So this not to dis Yahoo! mail since they just copied Gmail. #burn
Notification email of a bill
The email says that a statement is now available and ask me to log in to their dashboard to see it and make a payment.
Why does this annoy me?
Because I set up an automatic withdrawal, so I don't need to do the manual work every single month.
All I want to know is the amount and perhaps the extra charges to make sure they don't make any "mistake" and charge me more than they should (they never charge less when they make the "mistake" for some reason).
Why can't they just include the statement in the email? Of course they don't need to include any sensitive information in that email, but at the end of the day it's just an invoice.
Take away
These use cases may not seem important for the business since they don't contribute to the conversion because the users have been converted.
However, UX is not just about conversion. It's about relationship (aka customer retention). In that relationship, the job of a UX designer is to make things easy (in a human way) for the user to complete the tasks he has at hand.
That task in a lot of cases is part of his daily habit. Disrupting that habit would invoke a negative emotion which eventually (if happens often enough) would break the relationship.
For products that serve user's habit, the reason user abandon the product won't be merely because he's convinced that there's a superior product. He will abandon the product for an inferior competitor because he's frustrated and angry (emotion).
