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Working Towards Frictionless

UX Goals and Vision for PI-K

Hi everyone, I’m Megan Fisher, newly promoted director of Product Design here at Bridge. Something in my role that I am really passionate about is thinking about a person’s emotional and mental experience while they use our product. We have talked a lot about usability lately. But I am worried that the phrase usability doesn’t quite illustrate what our goals are. Usable kind of implies that “well if I can eventually do the thing I want to do, then that’s usable so my job is done.” What I often think about is how difficult some of the things are that people need to do when they are using Bridge. Planning for your career, filling out a performance conversation, Figuring out what your path to mastering a new skill, these are all things that take a lot of mental energy and can bring up difficult emotions for people. We cannot take that burden away, or do these things for people, but we can give them the tools and enable them to get it done, without causing any additional stress. This is why I think frictionless is a really great way to describe the ideal experience when using a product. If you think of friction as a type of resistance, then it makes it even more clear, we do not want to create resistance to using our product. It’s been said that good design is invisible. Design that causes friction, will bring too much attention to itself, which is not in the user’s best interest. We all experience friction throughout our lives and it’s usually in small ways and when we’re not expecting it, which is what makes it all the more frustrating. for example…

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The type of friction that we experience is what leads to what we like to call “Rage Clicks.” Where you’re just so irritated that it’s not doing what you expect it to that you start furiously clicking even though you know that won’t fix the issue. When I think of the best digital experiences they are often free of frustration with very little friction happening while you navigate and interact with them. Now some of us might have a higher threshold for these types of digital difficulties, which is why I want you to think about it in the context of a user who is doing something outside of their comfort zone, maybe behind schedule and wanting to get it over with. This is when friction within our product will do the most harm. So let’s take a look at something in Bridge where we are creating some unnecessary friction

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Here is an up close view of a couple screens, looking at these there is no clarity around which text is editable and which is not. I can edit the personal vision statement in the top of the right screen, and the list of activities on the right screen. I cannot edit the answer to the daily activities question on the left, but how would I know? There is no difference in the text, colors, or other indicator that they require different methods of interaction. These pages are beautifully designed and when you’re familiar with them they are usable and allow you to understand yourself and create a vision for your future. But if you were to test these with users I guarantee you would see them experience some friction. In fact we already have data to backup that text inputs are in issue. We’ve identified it in fullstory, several usability tests, and an accessibility audit.

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4 of 5 people testing our product faced this confusion

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Some before and afters...

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Our Usability and Accessibility Contract Engineers

Fabricio

@fabricio

Ruben Paz Chuspe

@Ruben Paz Chuspe

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PI-K Goals to help us work toward frictionless

Continue Usability Testing

Connect the Feature Dots

Complete the Pillar Website

Hold workshops to brainstorm how we can create a more connected product

Conduct usability tests for 3 more features/parts of Bridge

Standardize patterns and onboard new designers with this knowledge

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T H A N K Y O U