I can't figure it out!

You might have seen a dozen videos on TikTok where people have difficulty figuring out how to use a particular piece of technology.

I remember one where an old grandmother could not figure out how to turn off the alarm on her phone. It kept on buzzing every other minute in between a mass in the church. Poor grandmother, people stared at her like she did some cardinal sin.

In another one, a middle-aged man is trying to pair his newly bought sports watch with an Android phone. The watch kept displaying “Tap your watch to your phone to get started”. He tries many times failing and could not figure out what to do.

In both cases, the users are trying to figure out how to use a product to reach a particular goal. The grandmother’s goal is to turn off the alarm and the middle-aged person’s goal is to pair his watch to his phone. The frustration of not being able to understand how to achieve their goals has ruined the magical experience that was promised.

Why can’t users figure it out?

Most of the problems that users face can be attributed to product design choices and a lack of product research. Every user has goals when they buy a product. Every company has goals when they sell a product. A product succeeds when design choices made during product development achieve both the business goals and the customer goals. Product research should aim to lay out these goals for the designers to work with.

The Case of an Alarm

Let’s take the case of the grandmother trying to figure out how to turn her phone silent. The product needs here are:

1. Sound an alarm.

2. Convey the time.

3. System for turning the alarm off.

All these needs are basic functions for the product to be usable. But do we want to stop at just being usable? How would you design this for the best possible user experience?

Let’s take the first need into consideration here: Sound an alarm. It seems easy and straightforward.

From an engineering perspective, the phone has a good speaker that can play sounds at high decibels. Throw in a basic alarm sound and add functionality to set alarms, this solves the business goal without much engineering work. But, does that solve the user’s problem?

From the user’s perspective, he or she should have the functionality to choose a sound based on the alarm’s importance. People prefer soothing sounds to wake up in the morning. Some prefer emergency sounds to wake up early for important meetings. Some set a more melodious tune to wake them up in between a mid-day nap or remind them about a meeting. In many cases, when around a lot of people, people don’t really want the sound and prefer vibration from the haptic motors.

The product teams’ function is to find the right functions for the user's needs. The designer needs to figure out how to incorporate these functions into a product that is easy to use.

Let’s also take the third need into consideration: A system for turning the alarm off. In this particular consideration, there are three different functions that can be incorporated. One is the ability to switch off an alarm before it sounds, either permanently or temporarily. The second is the ability to silence the alarm when it is sounding. The third is the ability to snooze the alarm.

The grandmother did not know that the snooze button would sound the alarm again in 15 minutes. Maybe the design was not indicating how snooze works, or maybe the design did not give more prominence to the silence button. How could the designer make it more obvious? Should there be a sentence near the snooze button saying it will ring the alarm again? Or Should the Silence button be more prominent? What would have been the appropriate design choices here?

My father told me this, which I will always remember.

It is bad design if you have to explain your design.

To expand further on that quote, it is really hard to love a product if you have to learn to use it or if someone has to explain how it works. The simple solution here would have been two similar-sized buttons with Snooze and Silence functions.

To make them more informative and distinct about their functions, we would need to have “Snooze in 15 mins.” or “Snooze at 9:15 AM” as a copy inside the snooze button and “Turn off” or “Stop” as a copy inside the button to turn the alarm off. It is also beneficial to use two distinct colors for the buttons. Here are some iterations on making them distinctive and informative. They are appropriate signifiers for their purpose.

Design options for an Alarm Screen
1. Stacked buttons
2. Buttons spaced out
3. Buttons spaced out and with distinct color
4. Buttons flipped

What’s a Signifier?

Signifiers guide people to the next step, they convey what are the possible actions and what to do in order to advance from the current state and reach the goal.

“Good design requires, among other things, good communication of the purpose, structure, and operation of the device to the people who use it. That is the role of the signifier.”
Don Norman

The Case of the watch

Let’s get some discussion going here. Why do you think the user wasn’t able to figure out how to pair their watch to their phone? My guess is that the pairing process was making use of the NFC chip in the user's phone, which was turned off. There should have been an informative copy on the watch screen asking to make sure NFC was turned ON on the phone. What do you think the poor choice here was? Using NFC which can be turned off for pairing or is it a lack of research which did not uncover this problem during development?

What’s an NFC?
Near-field communication is a set of communication protocols that enables communication between two electronic devices over a distance of 4 cm or less. NFC offers a low-speed connection through a simple setup that can be used to bootstrap more-capable wireless connections.