Digital experiences in a time where apps rule the world
In todays world, most of what we do as humans involves using an app, this might be a food delivery app or even your work tool. Keeping that in mind, we can all agree that having a good experience when using those apps it’s vital and can lead to big problems if it’s implemented badly, today I come to explain a bad experience I had with a food delivery app here in Argentina and try to explain why I will keep using this app even though the experience I had wasn’t the best.
What happened?
Most of the times I tend to order food in the same places, because I know what I will receive and I’m not into experimenting with food places, but since prices when up I decided to order in a place that it’s well known here but I promised I won’t order there again after one day they cancelled my order and kept my money… My mistake… But I though “Well, that was only one time, let’s try this again”. Turns out I ordered 2 things and after hitting the submit button I was looking the “We are making your order” screen, all ok until that moment, but when the delivery man arrived I saw the bag and was missing something. I asked the delivery man where is the rest and without any response from him, I went to my house and try to make a claim but I was surprised… 1 second after I arrived home I got a call from another delivery man saying that my food is outside, I was pretty confused as you can imagine. Turns out the restaurant charged me 2 times with each independent thing I ordered and also charged me with the delivery fee…
This is actually “normal” on some restaurants here in Argentina, that’s why I tend to order on the same places that I know and trust, but was a big restaurant but actually got “screw” 2 times in a row.
After this not so sad story, why talk about UX?
Easy, I’m a usual buyer of the app, I will keep using it to order food because it’s the only app that works for me in all the features it has, but still needs work to be done, but the issue here is that I’m not most users, with my experience on UX and Product Development I understand that this things can happen and since it’s an issue with the restaurant it might not happen to me again if I order in another place, and here it’s what it’s bad for business, most users won’t be as “cool” with issues like this, with might resolve on users leaving the app and/or don’t ordering on that place ever again (like me).
Digital experiences is what rules the app world, what defined what we think about a product and if we will be using it in the present and future.
When you as a designer or business owner allow this type of issues happen, things will go south really fast, specially when there is no easy way of saying that something like that is happening, you have to basically spend 3 hours searching inside the app to find a blank page saying “too bad you had issues… Next”, or something like that. (Disclaimer: It’s not actually like that but the feeling I got was the same).
How can we avoid those type of issue?
Issues will come, you want it or not, but as designers and product development people we need to make sure the user feel secure, and if they have an issue, let them express themselves easily, it will make more work for us to create a feature or something for that, but the users will appreciate that. Don’t overestimate what a single bad experience can mean for the users, even something as small as what happened to me.
