Unexpected Obstacles to Usability

There are always obstacles in researching, developing and implementing more usable systems and processes. This is a given to anyone who has worked in the field. However, occasionally there are obstacles that come from unexpected areas that can pose serious challenges to usability efforts. How you deal with these challenges can make or break your program.

I encountered one such unexpected obstacle while working to improve the usability of a shopping cart system. The company I was working for was a provider of complete e-commerce solutions. This meant that they had developed proprietary back-end software that could be used by a number of different storefronts, thus leveraging their investment in technology across numerous clients. The shopping cart system was one of these components, shared by all clients.

The original shopping cart system was designed exclusively by software engineers with no input from the design or user experience groups. The cart was designed as a pop-up window activated when a user clicked to have a product added to his or her cart. Originally, this idea seemed logical for a number of reasons. The most salient argument was that a pop-up window would allow the shopper to remain in the shopping process by leaving them on the current product page. The rationale was that going to a separate cart page would be disruptive. A pop-up window, it was believed, provided for a more seamless shopping experience.

This argument went over very well, particularly with upper management and the business development staff. They began to tell the story of this "unique" and "seamless" shopping process and the pop-up cart as they spoke with investors and potential clients. However, there was never any empirical research on validity of this story, which turned out to be more fiction than fact. This didn't stop them from continuing to tell the story which had become a fixture of their presentations.

This is where usability research comes into the story. At first, we attempted to work with the pop-up cart to improve its usability without changing its pop-up status. We began to make numerous iterative changes based on our research and user feedback (For more information on the changes we made to the shopping cart process, please see the Shopping Cart Experience Case Study).

These changes occurred over a number of months as we continued to be frustrated with the usability of the shopping cart system. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that the pop-up version of the cart had reached its limits for meaningful improvement. At that point, we began to research a full page version of the cart. I reviewed as much literature on shopping cart systems as I could find and authored a proposal for a new system using a full page cart. This document was distributed to various staff members throughout the organization for feedback.

Nearly all the feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive. However, there were two distinct pockets of dissent: Upper Management and Business Development. My next step was to meet with these groups and try to uncover the nature of their objections.

In conducting these meetings, it became clear that these groups didn't object to the new system on any technical or usability grounds. Instead, I found that each of these groups had become comfortable with the story they had created around the old cart system. This story of a "seamless shopping experience with a pop-up cart" had taken on a life of its own among these two groups as they presented it in meetings with clients and investors. They were loathe to let go of this story as it had become central to their presentations.

While the designers, software engineers, and marketing staff were all able to clearly see the benefits of a new cart system, the business development and upper management staff needed a "new story" to tell. A better story. So that is how we framed these changes for them.

We began by describing the process more narratively and explicitly in comparison with the old pop-up cart. We found that some of the language we had used in the original proposal was too abstract for those not involved in web design or software development. Even though these concepts were fairly basic, we needed to show explicit benefits for each change rather than relying on the audience to make the conclusions for themselves.

We also developed paper prototypes to help them better understand what we intended to do. This cost-effective tool was one of the most effective ways to explain the material for these groups. No longer did they have to guess what we had in mind. We were able to show them a mock-up that clearly showed how the new system would work.

These alternate strategies did the trick. Nearly all objections were reversed when we presented the material in these new ways.

The moral of this story is that usability obstacles can come from unexpected areas. In this case, two very influential business units had objections to proposed changes for reasons not considered by the user experience group. By making our processes open and shared from a very early stage, we were able to discover these objections at a point where we could address them easily. If we would have proceeded without input from these groups, we may have found a much tougher obstacle. Imagine what might have happened if these groups had gotten wind of our work after we had begun implementation. They may have been very resentful and could have had the power to terminate the project altogether.

We also discovered that different business units needed the same information presented to them in very different ways. While some groups were comfortable and familiar with the processes we used, others needed a much more explicit, benefit-driven approach to the information. These differences shouldn't be viewed in a pejorative way. In fact, in reconceptualizing the information for a new audience, we were actually able to make progress for ourselves by going through the iterative process again and extending it into new media such as the development of a rapid paper prototype.

It is important to remember that even things that appear intuitively obvious to one set of people may be viewed very differently by another group of people, for completely different reasons. In this example, we eventually showed all involved that we were working toward the same goals and eventually, all parties agreed on the strategy and solution. However, we needed to take a different strategy in presenting the material to some of the decision makers involved. This was a valuable lesson and showed us the value of an inclusive and multidisciplinary approach to usability efforts across the organization.

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