Digital Product Access: The User Experience Problem of Our Time

Dean Schuster at UXDX Community: Transformation: The User Experience Problem of Our Time. Video: https://youtu.be/Y3EunxfXIts

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and the topic

[00:00:00] Hello, hello, it's nice to see you, thank you. I'm going to just dive right on in. First, thank you so much for having me, it's an honor to speak to the group, and I hope this talk will be of at least interest, if not controversy. We'll see.

[00:00:20] You can find me at experiencedean on Twitter as well as Instagram. And indeed I am a founder and partner of a UX firm here in the United States called truematter. All UX all the time, and we specialize in high complexity digital products, so a lot of give and take with serious development and process.

[00:00:44] Okay, today our topic: digital product access, what I'm calling the user experience problem of our time. And I really do mean that. But first, a story.

My mom, and what access actually means

[00:01:01] Now, when I do this talk I often ask how many people in the audience are with technical support, and I don't get that many hands raised. Typically I'm not speaking to technical support folks. But when I shift the question to how many of you provide technical support for your families or your loved ones, well then nearly every hand goes up. Because that's what we do for our families. We're always the people who understand all this stuff, and the people to whom our loved ones come for help.

[00:01:40] So this is my mom. She's wonderful, very smart, she does accounting and taxes for a living. But for my mom, digital product access — that means signing up, logging in, recovering passwords, things of this nature — this is a real barrier for her.

[00:02:01] So a typical phone call with my mom goes a bit like this, and you might find this familiar. My mom will call me and I'll say, hello Mom. And she'll go right past hello and right straight through: my Facebook doesn't come up. So I'll say, what do you mean your Facebook doesn't come up? Well, it doesn't come up. I said, well, what are you looking at right now? And my mom will say, the living room wall. Okay. All right Mom, how about you go in front of your computer, is that where you typically are accessing Facebook? Yes. Go to your computer. Right, what are you looking at now? My computer. And of course I know that this call is going to take some time.

[00:02:46] Now, my mom is a novice user, but as we'll see in a minute, just because she's a novice doesn't mean she's alone. These are the things that my mom has trouble with when it comes to digital products of all sorts. Now, I've mentioned Facebook, but when I talk to my mom or my aunt or my other aunt, the problems usually revolve around access, and I've found this has been true for years and years and years.

[00:03:16] The problems are almost always around access, not necessarily what we'll call real world use. So my mom has trouble signing up, logging in, staying logged in, recognizing when she's logged out — that's a big one — retrieving passwords, regaining access, and storing credentials. That's pretty much everything with respect to access. And that's a problem. If you've got a problem with any one of these things, just typical day-to-day interaction with products is going to be an issue. So I've had to learn the hard way how to patiently unpack this problem for her. She has trouble with all of it, every single aspect.

[00:04:04] Now my mom is not alone, and remember, my mom's a very smart person, highly educated, all of this. Sure, she's 77, but I've dealt with folks who are 90 who are pretty dang good at using digital products. So age is not necessarily an issue, because I've dealt with young people who have serious trouble with digital product access as well. But the thing is, most people struggle with access: novice users, intermediate users, power users, even expert trained users. There are problems associated with this, and what I want to do today is to convince you of the depth of the problem. That's what we're after today. Most product teams, and I will argue development-heavy teams, have a problem accepting this reality for what it is, and so I really want to take this to the nth degree today.

Know Your Doc, 1997

[00:05:00] Because my company has been in business for over 20 years, and we learned the problem of access very, very early on. As I look back on it now it seems very clear. Let's go back to a project that we did way back when. This is called knowyourdoc.com, and this was 1997. Not kidding. I'm willing to bet that some people listening today weren't born when I had this problem. That dates me a little bit, but it also tells us that the problem is not new, the problem is old.

[00:05:37] All right, so here is this wonderful Know Your Doc screen that we made. It's as big as I can make it. This is an old product. You didn't even actually have to log into this thing, but there was still a barrier. Now first, let me offer you a quick critique here, for fun. This is an old product, as you can see by the mountain of text we expected you to read in order to do anything, by the ludicrous chart and graph that bends at a 90 degree angle — I wonder what person thought of that — and this area where we're trying to hone down our results, and there's a zillion Go buttons, and there's a Start Over button, and there's a Learn More button, all this stuff. There's a lot going on and it's rudimentary.

[00:06:26] But the real problem, when we did a bunch of user testing on this — and we did user testing as we were creating the product, all the way through building it — this is what we learned. In order to use this product you simply had to do a couple of simple things. You had to choose a zip code in the United States, sort of a postal code, and a city-state, and then you could choose a physician specialty and go ahead and click Go, and you're going to get a certain number of physicians that you can match yourself to. That's basically the idea of it.

[00:06:59] Now, that seems pretty simple. You're not even logging in, you don't even have to present credentials, you don't have to present a username and password, anything like that. But we found access to be difficult for people. They had lots and lots of problems in our user testing on the simple upfront stuff, and that was a little either-or, to spit[?], choose specialty and go. In other words, before they had to do anything, before they could get into the app, before they could access all the wonderful things we made, they had trouble. And all of the usability problems we found early on were just getting them in. In fact, once they got in the usability problems dropped, which means even that really ridiculous graph you just looked at was fairly usable and people had very little trouble. They had trouble with access.

[00:07:43] And we started seeing this problem in all the user tests we did, and we have done a ton of user testing over the course of our company's existence, and certainly over the course of my career, and this keeps coming up.

Why access is so hard: the catch-22

[00:08:03] So the question I have for us today, that I want to explore and I want to impress on you and really sear into you, is why. Why is this such an issue, why is it so hard for people to get into products?

[00:08:20] First, access lives in this weird space between usability and security. The more usable you want something, you want to remove barriers to getting into something, into using it. But if you want something to be secure, you must add barriers, and we must have security. But barriers cause what we say in business circles these days, friction.

[00:08:49] And it really is a catch-22, which means it's a problem that's circular and is very difficult to solve. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. So let's say your product is hard to use, or maybe hard to access, or getting in is difficult. So you reduce access barriers to make it easier for people to get in. Of course that causes problems with security, and of course that means you have to add these security barriers, which of course in turn make access more difficult, make things harder to use. The very act of solving one problem creates the other problem, and vice versa, sort of in an endless loop. That's a catch-22, a very difficult problem we still live with today.

Sign up: FAFSA and 811

[00:09:35] Now, access itself frustrates people, and I cannot emphasize this enough. It perplexes them, and it gets them even angry. Let's start with sign up. And everything I'm about to show you is an existing product today. This is not some old product that no one uses anymore, it's really in use today.

[00:09:55] Now, people in America will know what this is right away. This is the FAFSA, or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. It's something that all adults who have children entering college fill out, and this helps calculate the type of aid they'll have based on income and things like this. It's just something everyone has to do, and it's a chore, it's a horrible pain and a chore.

[00:10:21] I'm going to show you a few screens. This is all sign up. You have to sign up for yourself, you have to sign up for your child, each different child. There are PIN numbers, there are secret codes, there's two-factor authentication at many stages of the process. There are stages of this process that have stages of processes within them. All of the different types of questions asked deal with data that you may not have on hand. They deal with financial data, they deal with sensitive identity data, all of these things. It takes forever to sign up, it's very hard, you almost always can't do it all at once. I can't even understand how people do this half the time, since I am a professional and really just want to tear my hair out when trying to do it.

[00:11:07] So again, if I speak and I'm in America and I say the word FAFSA, and there are people my age with college age young people, you can see on their face that they understand without even having to look at all these screens. Sign up is difficult. Now this is a relatively complex product, but sign up is overwrought, highly difficult, and here's the thing: it's meant for everyone to use, from the novice user through the power user. This does not appear to be a system whose access area is okay for novices. As I'm sort of cycling through this, you can probably imagine how wonderful it must be to do.

[00:12:00] It's highly complex, there are multiple systems, there are document uploads, the steps are unclear, help is mixed in, instructions are mixed in, there's really bad error messaging. And again, novices have to use it, and that just means they get angry. Very, very angry. In fact, this digital image was created by my team when they heard me getting angry at things like this and sort of losing it, and they made this for me.

[00:12:28] Okay, so let's move on to another thing. Here in the state of South Carolina where I live in the United States, if you want to plant some kind of wonderful shrub in your yard, you want to be careful not to dig in a place where you're going to hit a pipe or a wire or something like this. So you can dial this phone number, 811, and a whole bunch of people will come out from different agencies and they'll paint all over your lawn where you should not dig and plant a shrub. So I think, do I really need to call this number? Why can't I just go to some site and log in? And I can, of course.

[00:13:05] And here it is. This is really in place right now, and this is just the sign up. It would have taken me ER[?] minutes, if that, to make a phone call, but I'm a glutton for punishment of course, so I attempted to do it this way, and was faced with a great deal of time and frustration and setting up credentials and trying to sign in. And look at that lovely error handling. Wow.

[00:13:34] Some of the problems that are very obvious here: this is designed by developers. Sorry, lots of wonderful developers on my team, I am one myself. This is not accessible, it has horrible error handling, confusing layout, odd button placement, poor design, terrible content, you name it, it's all there. It's today. It's not something that is meant for people who are working in the 90s today. And so we get angry, we find it difficult to use. I'm a professional so I made it all the way through, but boy, I didn't like it.

The IRS activation code

[00:14:09] Now another thing in America we have is the dreaded Internal Revenue Service, and you can create an account with them. And of course, admittedly, this is sensitive stuff, this has to do with personal information, and it's the government and we want to be careful. But you can in fact set up the ability to pay your taxes through this portal. Fine and dandy. It's a very long setup process, I'm not even going to go through that part of it, although it was terrible.

[00:14:38] But you go through this terribly long, involved setup process only to arrive at this wonderful screen after you think you're done: activation needed. Now this might be small on your screen, so I'm going to make it a little bit bigger so you can see exactly what it is they're saying. First, once you're done, you need an activation code sent to your address of record via US mail. I have people who work for me who I don't know that they even know how to mail a letter, let alone find out where to get a stamp. You need the activation code to complete the registration process and access the application — great developer speak there. The letter should arrive in five to ten business days. Two weeks, who can say. And it explains how to activate your IRS user profile. If you don't receive the letter within 15 days, log in with your username and password to request that we resend a new activation code.

[00:15:47] Now of course I did this, I forgot, I waited 16 days. Too late, Dean. And I had to do this again, and you can imagine how happy I was, because I had to wait again to receive that activation code by mail in another five to ten business days. I just want to log in.

[00:16:09] And again, these are problems that as a professional in the business I am having. I cannot imagine other people using it who have trouble with technology. I certainly can't imagine my mom doing this, because this is delayed gratification, this is all the responsibility put on me, I've got to remember things. They're not communicating what's going to happen well, there's a vague process, I'm not prepared for the fact that I'm going to have to do this. And it's way, way harder than finding in my closet a paper check and figuring out how to send it to a place with an actual stamp and a letter. It's way harder than that. And this is modernity, we should be making things easier. And of course we get angry.

Login, passwords and slow progress

[00:16:54] Now access should be easy, login should be easy. We have patterns for this, don't we? We do it every day, we develop it all the time, it's the most common thing we do. Think about changing your password with Microsoft, which is a whole lot of fun if you've ever done that, and especially if you're a Mac user. If you're a Mac user, suddenly this is how you learn that you have to change your password: suddenly something just doesn't work, and you have to start investigating why, and you realize, wait, wait, wait, maybe I'm being prompted to access my password. So I try to log in online, and sure enough, I've got to go ahead and change and re-authenticate with Microsoft, as is my wont every few months. But I have to change it on my phone, my desktop app, my web Teams, Teams mobile, Teams recordings, all of it, every time. Two-factor every time. Not that I can't handle it, not that I don't have the two-factor app, but man, it's pretty rough.

[00:17:55] All right, and this is partially why I call access the user experience problem of our time. It's the thing that frustrates us the most, the thing that takes time, the things that we have to do that cause problems when we're in a hurry and need to get work done. All of these problems with Microsoft are simple, even though they're kind of doing the things they need to do for security purposes. It doesn't mean the experience is right. All of these things are true about that process, and these processes are not abnormal processes, but they do get us angry, deeply frustrated with technology. They're ravaging our experience.

[00:18:38] Now, other problems we have in there, big ones. Technology and security are evolving very slowly, way more slowly than we would like. You think certain devices have done really well in helping us get access and helping make the access problems simpler. Our phones are a great example of this. First we had a certain number of digit codes, now they're usually six digit codes, but we can handle that, we understand what a PIN is and things like that, and even my mom understands this. So that's good, that's progress. We've moved to Touch ID. Okay, it's not perfectly secure, but it's got the feeling of ease to it, and it helps us use our phones, it helps us use our tablets. Face ID, another thing, again also not perfect, I know this has been faked, yes, yes, but it helps things become easier. And depending on what app ecosystem you use, you get other types of ease that comes along with it.

[00:19:38] However, as much as we've done well with phones, and even there's some biometrics on laptops and things like that, as much advancement as we've made on some devices, in other areas we're still lagging behind and we're still doing passwords and usernames and retrieval and authentication, and we have to manage them, and it's not all easy. Bits of it are. And I would even argue that phones that have been around forever, smartphones have been around for a long time now and we're still solving this problem. So I get the feeling that we're going to be solving this access problem the rest of my career, at the very least. Which means it's the problem of our time.

[00:20:21] All these things are not easy today, they're really not easy. Digital tools and passwords, totally out of control. The average person has a hundred passwords — this is a recent study in 2021. Well, I don't know, I stopped counting as I started approaching 400. I'm sure I've got more. I was like, okay, this is a lot, this blows it away. Conservative estimate, this is just a quick look at some of the folders in my password manager. So this is why people end up not using these things and having bad passwords and faulty security, because their experience of dealing with so many things is so bad and so problematic. We definitely get this all the time, we see this all the time by the way with users. They really are reusing these passwords still, only when they're required not to are they barely getting to that. And don't get me started about how hard it is for people to understand password requirements. Spoiler alert: very hard for people.

Innovation has not made things easier

[00:21:27] And innovation has not always made things easier, and that's the real frustrating thing for me. TV when I was a kid — all right, I'm not that old, I'm 50 — but when I was a kid TV was easy. You just turned on the TV. Sure, you had three channels and you had to get up and go turn a dial, that's fine, but as soon as you turned the dial your show was on. You just looked at a little script that said what show is on when. That's pretty easy.

[00:21:52] As TV evolved it became more feature-rich and more amazing, but way harder to use. And we're now working in this area of reducing complexity of things like remotes, and we're doing a little bit better at it, but not much. You get to streaming television and you have all of the problems of credentials and passwords and retrieval and two-factor and setup and sign in, and you still have remotes. TV is really hard to watch today compared to what it used to be. It is. We're in an explosion, a golden age of content, but it's way harder to do than it was. And so we still have to deal with all this stuff.

[00:22:37] Credential recovery, brutal. It's so hard for users, they have a hard time with this, I cannot emphasize this enough. Rather, they truly hate this and complain about it an awful lot. It's just a fact of life, it is a fact of security, but it's an issue.

[00:22:54] Imagine what I had to do to even explain two-factor authentication to my mom, who's again a very smart person. I simply had to explain it and say, what if you have a key to your house, and you turn the lock but you can't get in, and you call me and I have to show up with the real key and let you in. Every time. Unless somehow you ask the house to remember you, I don't know. But she got it after that, and just looked at me like I was an idiot, and I can't really blame her.

[00:23:25] And of course there's terrible consistency with implementing two-factor across the board, across products. It's no wonder people have difficulty with this, big time. It's just basically a series of difficult experiences even with the best two-factor. It really is.

[00:23:54] In fact, the first time my mom used two-factor she had to stop everything and call me, because she was concerned it was a scam. She'd been so trained to be careful about scams, two-factor itself felt like one to her, and we had to talk her through that and say, well, this is one of those exceptions. And that was actually a difficult thing to sort out. Upset or frustrated or flummoxed or angry, it's an experience-crushing thing. And remember, we haven't even done anything yet, we're just trying to get in.

Big companies and dev-centric teams

[00:24:25] And I'm going to argue that single sign-on and big companies, things are not a lot better. Your problems are different, and your problems of access have a different type of scale to them. When we have to define a digital product, this is what we talk about the most: we talk about security, authentication, roles, permissions, single sign-on, edge cases, admin, everything having to do with getting in and understanding who you are and starting to work. That's what we spend all of our time on. That's all access. It's all access.

[00:24:55] When people at big companies have problems, they've got to do this stuff: help desk, support tickets, workarounds, workarounds, access requests. Sound like fun to you? If you're in big companies, you know this is not fun. Not fun at all.

[00:25:08] Another problem is that dev teams aren't focusing on access experience. And I mean dev-centric teams. There's plenty of dev teams that have lots of great UX folks and BAs and content strategists and things like that that help, but dev-centric teams with only developers have a real hard time with this. And the main problem is that they feel it's already solved, particularly login or credential recovery. We solved this, we have patterns for this, let's get to the real work, let's push our patterns out to people and get to the real stuff we want to do. And that's a dangerous way to think about digital products when the problem is this deep.

Internalize the depth of the problem

[00:25:48] Okay, access is a problem for everyone. It's a problem for novices, intermediates, power users and experts, trained people. This is a problem for everyone. We've seen it again and again and again, we haven't yet stopped seeing it, and that's what I'm trying to impress on you today.

[00:26:05] So, is it bleak? Yes, it is bleak from an experience perspective. It's simply important, desperately important, that we know this, and that's what this talk is about today. I want you to never forget how difficult access is for people, and it's going to be a problem for a very, very long time. Remember, things are moving slowly. The public and everyone is able to accept and use less than what we know we can do, and it's going to be that way for a while. So that means we've got to be thinking about it all the time, even when we assume we already have the answer. Especially if.

[00:26:47] I want you to recognize this as a problem, I want you to deeply understand it, and I want you to internalize it. It is incredibly important for your work, because if people have this much trouble just getting into the stuff you're making, you've got to pay lots and lots of attention to those entry points, those access points, those re-entry points.

[00:27:11] Now, you can do something about this of course, but that is an entirely different talk, where we talk about how you take this realization and move forward with it. And I hope at some point perhaps I'll get to give you that talk, but for now it's a victory if you deeply internalize the depth of the problem, because then you can think differently about acting, and a lot of solutions are not that difficult when you think that way.

[00:27:39] All right, so that's another talk. I do have some further reading though. We've done a little writing about this user experience problem of our time over on our blog at truematter. This is not sales stuff, this is just for you, I hope it helps you. And a little spoiler on some of the things you can do, which is tackling the maddening problem of digital product access. If you just go to truematter.com you'll find our blog and you'll find these really easily. But if you're interested, read them, they'll help you and they'll set you on your way.

[00:28:10] For my purposes in this particular talk, that said, again, my name is Dean and I really appreciate your attention as I've really laid out the bleak story of digital product access. Thank you very much.