Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

TAKING WORK AWAY
One of the few reliable rules in innovation is that it is rarely described positively by users
unless it takes work away. I’ll call this innovation by removal, though in fact it often
involves adding technology to your product. The online food ordering company Seamless
is a good example. It’s generated a good following by removing the annoying and timeconsuming
inconsistency in the experience of ordering food for delivery. If you do any
takeout ordering, you’ll know that online menu displays and ways of navigating them and
placing orders are all over the map, and they’re often cumbersome to use. On Seamless,
each restaurant’s menu has been put into a consistent design, and all of them can be
interacted with in the same way. In addition, users’ payment information is saved, so after
your initial order, placing a new one is a snap. Another great example is the mobile app
Uber, which has simplified the huge hassle of hailing a cab. I live in New York City and
there are times when getting a taxi can be nearly impossible—and that’s always right
when you need to get somewhere fast. By using GPS location technology, Uber matches
the location of users with that of taxis nearby, so you know where to head.
Other products use recent innovations in hardware to remove the hassle of data entry,
such as the Chrome browser’s autofill feature, which immediately fills in first and last
names, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and other key information
whenever it’s requested. Dropbox is a great case of using the big new innovation of cloud
data storage services in a way that has removed a big hassle. Moving data between devices
and sharing it with others used to require all sorts of intermediaries, going way back to
floppy disks and up to flash drives. Now with Dropbox, files are hosted in “the cloud”
where anyone you want can access them easily; no more clunky intermediaries. The
concept of the cloud can be mystifying to people, but Dropbox has created an interface
that is wonderfully intuitive; it gets out of the way and lets users easily see all the files in
their “box” without even having to ask, and they don’t have to do any file management.
Still other such innovative products make tasks like searching, reading, communicating,
and buying things easier all the time.
The success you may achieve by finding a new way to remove some hassle shared by
the mass public can be staggering. PayPal took away the hassle and danger of exchanging
money online, not only for merchants but for all individuals. Netflix has delighted users
by removing many hassles, starting with the need to go to a video store at all and the huge
annoyance of late fees. More recently it solved the need to remember which episode of a
series you watched last by always taking you to the next one when you return to watching
that show, no matter how many weeks or months have passed.