Written by Fang, 2021 Cohort
You must have experienced some anxious moments while eating in a restaurant, as of late. However, good restaurants will try every effort to relieve customers’ anxiety. In the following passages, I will compare the dining experience in good restaurants with the user experience of online products, in order to show you some useful methods for relieving anxiety generally caused by digital products.
The first method is to show the real-time progress while customers are waiting. I believe this method is widely employed in restaurants in big cities in China, since sometimes customers outnumber restaurant resources. Many restaurants hang a big screen on the wall, scrolling the latest seat information. How to employ this method in online products? Research shows that users are basically fine with feedback within 2 seconds for software products. But users get anxious or even angry at feedback beyond 8 seconds. I think whenever we need to let users wait for a relatively long time (more than 2 seconds), we must tell users in advance how long they need to wait, establish a psychological expectation, so as to reduce anxiety. When an operation will interrupt the current interface, or needs to run in the background, and may occupy more than 2 seconds, a progress bar that changes dynamically could be a good solution.
The second method is to turn boring waiting into entertainment. For instance, in the waiting area of the Hi-Pot restaurants, customers can sit there leisurely, have free fruits and drinks, and enjoy the free Internet, shoe shine and nail services provided, in the store. The boring waiting in line has become a kind of enjoyment because they try to find things for customers who have nothing to do. Good digital products also follow the same rule. For example, when the network of Google Chrome is interrupted, you can press the spacebar to play a mini game, which is very engaging to me. I believe this game greatly eliminates the irritability and anxiety of many users.
The third way to reduce anxiety is to be humorous and considerate. Don’t you feel confused or angry when you are eating in a restaurant, the waiter tells you that he can’t serve you food anymore, but he doesn’t give you any explanation? When unexpected accidents happen to a digital product, we have the responsibility to comfort our users instead of upsetting them. We should never leave an empty page to users when there is no Internet connection. Instead, we could use humorous pictures and copywriting to explain the reasons for the failure and tell users possible solutions.
In short, in addition to the three methods above, there are many other ways to relieve users’ anxiety. Whenever we are confused and stuck during design periods, we could always try to seek inspiration from the customer experience of restaurants around us.
Reference: https://ant.design/components/progress-cn/