[UX] Problem solving – LinkedIn – How do network features ruin UX in your product?
I want to introduce how a network feature including call back ruins our users’ experience today. I bet you may have more than one feature in your product at least, and you may be missing something to make users frustrated. That means your UX is able to be bad somewhere.
1. Prologue
These days we can see lots of convenience features in the product like autocomplete, so you don’t need to type the full text keyword. This kind of feature makes it easier to do users’ tasks and also gives an advantage of data regulation.
By the way, when you consider the feature, please check this one.
2. Case
2.1. Successful user scenario
Here is a simple case about autocomplete when you enter the keyword in the text field. Mostly it is used for the data of location that can be regulated.
When you type the keyword in the first step as below,
You can see the keyword suggestion with the autocomplete feature like this.
After you choose the keyword from the list,
Then you can see the keyword is reflected in the result page as below.
2.2. Unsuccessful user scenario
Here is a similar case about the unsuccessful user scenario. You can see the text field to type the keyword.
However, you may not see the keyword suggestion with the autocomplete due to the reason as below.
In this step, you can still type the keyword, but autocomplete is not working properly as you can see below.
Then, you can finally see the error even if you type the exact same keyword that the system suggested.
Furthermore, if you just try to save data that you input to press the save button as below,
You can see the unclear error message again like this. (“Your application wasn’t saved. Please try again.”)
I tried to go to the previous step and the next step, and checked if I was wrong to input the text fields, but I couldn’t figure out why the error was still there.
Finally, I gave up and I had to discard all the data that I input in the whole steps.
Can you guess what happened in the product?
3. Problem
Some people might have noticed what was going on there. After a while I noticed I lost the Internet connection.
However, the OS system didn’t show the status of the network when I lost it, and the error message in the page also didn’t give any hint about that.
Even the pages of the application for the job looked like it was still working well without any kind of 404 errors.
As far as I understood, it seemed to save the data in the session or cache to manage them in each step. If not, users would have lost their data when they moved to each page in each step.
This bad UX situation can occur in any of type web pages or products to save and keep the data in each step, and use this kind of call back feature like autocomplete.
4. Solution
Fortunately, in this kind of case, users don’t worry about losing their data even if they lose their Internet connections.
Therefore, if you make sure of a little more logic to check the Internet connection when users submit their data, it could be clearer to notice the situation to them.
Then, you can show a more friendly error message like this from the conditional logic.
“You seem to have lost the Internet connection. Please check that and try again.”
In addition, when you design the call back feature like autocomplete, you also need to consider the manual input by users.
Mostly, the feature is interconnecting with search engine daemon, but the daemon can’t be working due to some reasons.
In that case, even the user may not know what is going on now.
Otherwise, here is a solution. You could frequently check the status if the daemon is alive or not while users are in the pages. (I bet this may affect your system performance, so I don’t recommend it though.)
That’s why I would rather just support the manual way as well, and then check the validation when they submit the data even if that might not be the perfect solution.
5. Epilogue
Someone has asked me about this case occasionally.
“Hey, why do we have to consider these kinds of technical issues as a UX designer?”
At that time, I always told them,
“Then, who cares about our users?”
I can strongly say, “Don’t miss out on this kind of thing as much as you want to find pixel problems in your design.” It could critically ruin your product UX.
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