Imagine a user who spends 95 percent of their smartphone time reading content like emails, social media and web pages. The remaining 5 percent might be split between phone calls, photos and navigation in the car.
Would it be reasonable to conclude the reading experience plays the most important role in the user’s choice of device, given how much of their usage is confined to this activity?
Maybe.
However, there is a counter argument which suggests the things users do infrequently – and therefore are unfamiliar with – play a bigger role in determining the overall experience. This theory may be applied equally to devices or individual apps and services.
For instance, even when reading content occupies 95 percent of the user’s time with the device, its role in determining overall experience quality may be small, for several reasons:
Reading, therefore, could be classified as an activity which takes up a lot of time, but has little influence on overall product experience.
In contrast, something like navigation could play a much greater role in determining the user experience, even though it takes up a comparatively tiny proportion of the user’s time. Again, there are several explanations for this:
As a result, the significance of the navigation experience in determining the user’s overall impression of the product is higher than reading content, despite the fact it represents a small proportion of their overall usage.
In an ideal world, of course, there would be infinite time dedicated to ensuring all aspects of an overall experience were meticulously crafted to meet user expectations. However, anyone working in the field of UX will know one of the most important skills is understanding where to focus very limited resources to achieve the most meaningful improvements.
What this example teaches us is that this requires a more complex evaluation than simply looking at the activities users perform most often or what they claim to be their priorities when asked. Instead, UX practitioners must develop a sixth sense for applying a weighting system to the overall importance of certain interactions, and focusing their efforts on those which mean the most, rather than simply those which occur most frequently.
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Very perceptive! There are some features and/or functions which are essential and therefore take precedence over the ease-of-use of other functions. I chose a tablet-laptop running Windows because I need native Office, even though 80%+ of my use is browser-based.