Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Casey Bombacie

If you hate something, don’t you do it too. — Eddie Vedder

A couple of days ago I was doing some research on various corporate websites. Harmless enough. Until I came to Boeing.com. Everything looked good at first glance, typical large image, small nav. It was my first time to the site, so I was pleasantly surprised…for the first 4 seconds.

Don’t mind me!

Then it happened. A big, fat, ugly, pop-up jumped right onto my face. They were asking for feedback. The primary question is: would you help us to make our website better? My initial response was, the same as yours, NO! But the UX-er in me, kicked in. Yes. I do want to help you make your website better! Here’s two ways:

Start by REMOVING that Goodyear blimp of a feedback modal in the first 4 seconds.
Then, re-read your sentences out loud. (Would you help us to make our website better?) That took me 3 times to read it and remember what it said as I wrote this article.
Why not: Can you help us make this site better?

747 Coming through!

As I said, 4 seconds ago, it was my first time to the site. I am not the user you want critiquing your website. I don’t even know what’s in it. Not even after 4 minutes would I want to give feedback. We know, through analytics our repeat visitors — target them!

But wait, there’s more!

I pressed on in my attempt to find the information I was looking for. I x-ed out of the feedback modal and then navigated to another link.

Within 4 more seconds, ANOTHER modal! More feedback? Look, I get it. I want user data and feedback as much as the next UX-er. But this is getting out of hand Boe (Short for Boeing, kind of like Bae).

This time they want my information. It’s a newsletter sign up! Granted it’s for the “exciting world of aviation.” Still, it was over the top. Alas, you win Boeing. I left the website. Or was it that you lost? Either way, I left and had none of the information I was looking for.

Fast-forward

We, the company I work at and I, were desiring to get feedback within our product on a specific page. We had wrapped up some initial usability surveys that covered the whole product. Now we were looking at one specific page within our product. So, we turned to HotJar and started with a very unobtrusive “Poll.” It sat, so cute, in the bottom of our page. It would shyly pop up when you hit the page and would wait for interaction.

We got a few responses. It was a 3 question poll that we discussed as a product team, and settled on. It consisted of a Y/N question then 2 short input questions, less than 30 seconds to complete it all.

Did you find what you were looking for on this page?
What were you looking for?
If you could change one thing on this page, what would it be?

Simple. Straightforward. Our first couple of responses came in, users answered only the first question. Sad! (Note: we discovered that in “Polls” in Hotjar you cannot make the questions required.) That was a bummer. Glad to have some results but incomplete answers were of no help.

See? Totally unobtrusive.

Then it happened. With only 3 incomplete results, we decided to be more aggressive with our approach. We switched to a “Survey”, this allowed us required answers and a big, fat, ugly modal.

To be clear, this is an enterprise SaaS. So, not a website with 100,000s of first-time visitors. We set it to explode after 5 seconds on the page.

Then we waited…

As you can expect, we got a few results. Now they were complete. we jumped into HotJar, and watched as a large number of people closed out the modal. It, as we know, was a massive interruption to their workflow.

We changed the modal to explode when somebody gets ready to leave the page. Results are now flooding in more consistently and completely. Duh!

Eddie was right.

Sorry, not sorry. I grew up in Seattle in the 90s. The height of grunge. And it’s a great quote: if you hate something don’t you do it too?

Sometimes in our desire to be user-centered, we can still become us-centered. In our attempt to get feedback, surveys, et al; we can steamroll the user.

We’ll all make mistakes, hopefully lots of them, the dream is to learn from them. So, go! Make mistakes, make bad user experiences (not on purpose). Learn from it so that we can create amazing user experiences.

And, no, you will most likely not get great results with a giant, user-interrupting pop-up. 😉

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

UX Mistakes was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UX Mistakes

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