I recently finished usability testing on a Cisco router product and discovered that power users felt extremely satisfied overcoming the product's complex UI challenges, despite the frustrations.
Done!
At 5pm today, after I signed off from my EchoUser Analytics account, said goodbye to my 10th participant, I officially finished the testing part (oh yeah, the research and report writing part is yet to come… 😉 ) for this usability benchmarking study on an upcoming Cisco router product. This new router product will be used to set up networks in small business environment, so that means, if you are reading this blog post right now, my dear readers, most likely, never once in your life, you’ll be put in a position to use a product like this.
So who are the users? Engineers or technicians who work at Cisco resellers. People who usually have years of experience working in the field, at clients’ sites, helping tens if not thousands of companies setting up their wired and wireless network, configuring the network’s security services, customizing VPN accounts, etc. They have to be the power users of the UI of router products. This is their job, so for one thing, they interact with UIs in this domain on a daily basis; for another thing, it’s their expertise in this domain that makes them special and let them be able to earn their living.
I did expect those power users to go through the router configuration tasks we prepared for them in a logic and efficient way. However, what I did NOT expect was how they felt extremely “rewarded” after they had overcome the obstacles in the UX and UI design of the router product. Normally, users are supposed to feel defeated when they make errors and mistakes when interacting with a system.
One interesting anecdote: there was this one task I asked the users to establish a site-to-site VPN tunnel (simply put, just to let two routers on the Internet to talk to each other). There was this technician from San Jose, who had more than 20 years of experience dealing with router products, sitting in front of the desktop to finish this task. Despite various of hurdles he had to go through to be able to get to the last step of the whole configuration process, what finally threw me off was, in order to complete the task, as the last step, the user needed to click this super tiny and grayed out “connect’ icon which was hidden among a group of other icons on the screen, it was as if a joke the product designer intentionally played on the users to NOT let them accomplish what the users hope to accomplish.
After exploring on the configuration page for over 5 minutes, perhaps guided by some supernatural forces, the user actually did find that little “connect” icon, and clicked on it. Mission succeed! With all those frustrations and confusions I observed in this process, I would expect this San Jose network engineer to give me some feedback like “that process was frustrating” “they could have designed in a better way to make the icon more obvious.” However, in fact what I heard was “that wasn’t too hard”, “glad that I did find that button to click.” He seemed to have enjoyed this “intellectual battle” with the product designers.
On one side, the product designers were creating these super hard “mazes” for power users to solve; on the other side, the more difficult these “mazes” are, the more rewarding these power users would feel, and to some extent they are actually proud of the fact that they are given “mazes” like these to solve. Those “mazes” are the watermarks for their professionalism.
I recently came across this interesting perspective from Alan Cooper‘s book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum,” he categorizes the modern technology users into two groups:
High cognitive friction polarizes people into two groups. It either makes them feel frustrated and stupid for failing, or giddy with power at overcoming the extreme difficulty. These powerful emotions force people into being either an ‘apologist’ or a ‘survivor.’ They either adopt cognitive friction as a life, or they go underground and accept it as a necessary evil.” As Cooper put it “regardless of how hard an interaction is, or how uselessly obscure a feature is, the apologist will unerringly point to the power and functionality of the gadget, blithely ignoring the difficulty of actually using it.
I wouldn’t say that was exactly what had driven the engineer who apparently “suffered” from the user experience of the router product to still give me positive feedback, but I think Cooper has given a quite reasonable explanation to it. Indeed, engineers like to work in an environment where their special skills and domain knowledge can make a difference. That’s how they differentiate themselves from the crowd. In a sense, they are shouting at the product (the product designers indeed), saying “the tougher the better!” However, should that be the criteria for UX professionals to design products for them? Perhaps not. The increased level of complexity of a system would increase the possibility of human errors, the possibility of project failures and the level of education/training needed to operate a system. Well, if the price we are going to pay for implementing simpler and more usable UI for power users (like those network engineers) will just be: the lowered self-efficacy for those powerful power users, I’d say “deal.” 🙂
