A transcript of Episode 258 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Joe MacLeod to discuss ends: how designing closure experiences and off-boarding can improve the experience for customers and even profitability..
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Bevan Nicol.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast, Episode 258.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
I’m James.
Per Axbom
I’m Per.
James Royal-Lawson
And this is UX podcast, balancing business, technology, people and society every other Friday for rapidly approaching 10 years and reaching out to listeners in 198 countries and territories from Spain to Serbia.
Per Axbom
Is that one up? I feel like it used to be 197 or something.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, it was 197 at one point. It’s gone up reasonably recently. Yeah, I think it was last episode, it went up. I haven’t worked out exactly which one. I thought it was Zimbabwe, but I’m not sure now.
Per Axbom
We have a UX podcast classic interview for you today, in which we talk to Joe McLeod. And what we talk with Joe about are closure experiences: offboarding, bringing things to an end.
James Royal-Lawson
Joe defines a closure experience as the satisfactory conclusion to a product or service relationship, each party feeling satisfied with the complete transaction. I being a fair, just conclusion without negative consequence.
Per Axbom
And since we recorded this interview, Joe published his book, Ends. It’s about how we overlook endings and why we shouldn’t.
[Music]
Per Axbom
Since we’re just jumping in, I mean, I’d like to just start off because you’ve done so many amazing things. You worked at Nokia, you have produced mobile services for pregnant women in Africa. That blew my mind, sort of. And now you’re doing this thing on closure experiences. But tell us your background, how you got into this industry and what your passions are.
I guess my first degree was in graphics, I very much enjoyed doing that. I used to do loads of posters for like comedy people and album covers, and, you know, great big clubs and stuff. That was great fun. But I didn’t really have the appetite. Then, when the web came along, and you’re sort of designing these three dimensional interfaces, that’s super exciting. Because doing posters, you’re looking at something in a two dimensional realm, has meaning and emotion in it. But then being able to make that interactive, that was something special. So I really got excited about getting into interaction design. And then I went to the Royal College done an interaction design course, called CRD at the time – computer-related design, this was like 1999-2000. And I was sort of really interested in mobile, and this was way before it was colour screens, it was tiny.
James Royal-Lawson
This is when it was Nokias, with Snake.
Per Axbom
Yeah, but then there was this emotional meaning behind these things which was changing society with, you know, that mobile presence thing, the triangulation of location. And then I started developing these sort of stalker services for mobile, which were based on that. Any horror film is based on the absence of real information. So that’s what makes horror compelling, that you go to a place and you don’t know what’s happening. So with mobile, knowing where someone is, providing contextual information which is sinister to that individual at that moment, makes it very scary, and an extraordinary experience for them. Might be a negative one, however. But that was really exciting. So I was I was really into mobile, and I started doing bits for Orange afterwards. And that was right at the dotcom boom-crash times. I worked for a company called Oyster Partners at the time, which then turned into LBI many years ago.
James Royal-Lawson
Now that’s a consultancy firm. It’s international isn’t it?
Joe Macleod
Yeah, yeah, it’s massive, LBI. One of the biggest. And I was doing mobile stuff for them. Then there was massive mobile games party thing in 2000. We had an incredible dotcom budget for that – a quarter of a million quid we spent on the party.
James Royal-Lawson
I think we’ve been part of those 2000 times as well, when the budgets had an extra zero.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And then I left there when it crashed out, which I was actually happy to go and move really into mobile then and then Orange, a couple of other small things, and then ended up at Nokia and done five years at Nokia. That was in the boom times of Nokia as well because they were making… I mean they had 51-52% market share around that time.
James Royal-Lawson
Before the iPhone came out, man. Yeah, I mean Nokia was just so dominant. Globally, even in the Far East. I mean, it was just Nokia everywhere.
Joe MacLeod
It was amazing.
Per Axbom
So were you there when the iPhone came out?
Joe MacLeod
Yeah. And we were doing stuff which was like, you know comparable in concept. But the really the appetite of the senior management was super conservative. They wanted to do fold phones til they blew the whole world to bits with fold phones.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, as a Symbian user, because of course here in Ericsson, Symbian was something that was quite large amongst of the tech side of things. Then, yeah, I was very familiar with what Nokia were doing. And the way that we all thought, ‘Well, now the iPhone thing won’t really take over all this, because this is actually, you know, already so much further ahead in many ways.
Joe MacLeod
Yeah, well there was a real arrogance in management. They were saying that that’s a niche product, the iPhone is a niche product. They also thought Blackberry was a niche product. With that level arrogance, it doesn’t last very long. And then, I think 2012, three billion loss was it? So, you die pretty quick when you die. You know, Apple’s really excited at the moment, and I’m sure death will come to all empires. So we can reflect on that.
Per Axbom
Yeah, well, that’s a nice segue into death.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, not just death.
Joe MacLeod
So come back to why I ended up on this. In around 2004, I think I had a couple of experiences that made me think about this in a sort of compelling way, I guess. I’d done some teaching. And I was I set that sort of cliche project for the students ofwaste and rubbish and “Go off, what can we do about it?” And they all went off in their groups, and then they come back excitedly and present more sort of rubbish for the world. And we sort of end up with the only vocabulary we’ve got is “more rubbish.” And another thing that happened was I, at the time, I signed up for a service, which is sort of this avatar voice recognition thing on Orange at the time, the mobile phone company, and then you’d ring up and get your voice messages when people used to leave messages.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I remember that.
Per Axbom
Yeah, so I signed up for that. And I excitedly had this vision of me having a PA, like an avatar-type PA. And the reality is that you just couldn’t use it when you’re out and about, it just didn’t hear you at all. And it just ended up shouting at me all the time. Sorry, I don’t understand you. Sorry, I don’t understand. And I ended up experiencing such hatred for it, that it wouldn’t have been satisfactory to just end the service in a sort of, like, “I’d like to turn this off now and not pay for it anymore.” I really wanted an emotional satisfaction of killing it, or bury it. I wanted to throttle it til its horrible avatar eyes died.
So then, around that time, I started to pull this together – that we have no vocabulary for endings. We have so much rich emotional vocabulary for beginners and nothing for endings. And that was the start of the question around closure experiences. So anyway, roll forward a few years. And it’s always been in the background, this whole closure experiences thing. I wrote a document for a big company about at the time, and that was well received, but didn’t really dig into the essence and the background or the history so much, it was quite a sort of surface thing. And then I was asked too for many years, and it just keeps coming up that repeated sort of examples of like lack of endings.
James Royal-Lawson
And some examples. Because I mean, we’re talking about closure experience now in a digital realm. So just give us a couple of examples.
Per Axbom
So the amount of times we get pushed to share, for example. If I’m going through my interface of my phone, I’m in the camera mode, take a picture. Share. And then I get into gallery and I’m editing. Share. And I’ve saved into gallery and I’m gallery browsing. Share. And it’s then in our social media, when we look at the news, like the amount of share buttons in different share platforms. So, in a news thing, you might have 10, for example, opportunities of different providers to share your content, share this bit of news. Share, share share everywhere.
And the ability for us to control that after we’ve shared it is so so limited, and it’s so difficult for us to unravel, sharing, and control sharing, and unshare, for example. So we end up with mechanisms or like very inadequate mechanisms like the European directive on the right to be forgotten, which puts expectations on providers to control content that’s been shared like Facebook or Twitter or someone like that. But even in Facebook’s T’s&C’s, they clearly acknowledge that they have no control over this stuff once it goes outside of their borders and is even hard to control inside their system.
James Royal-Lawson
That is a really good point, because I mean, the whole fabric of the internet is based on eternity. If we talk technically about URI’s or resource locators that the whole specification for that says that you should never have a Page Not Found, a 404. You should always redirect it to tell people how to continue, how things then live on.
Joe MacLeod
Even if you go back as far as the birth of internet, the internet project the which the American army investigated. The very purpose of that, the fundamentals – this can’t be destroyed by a nuclear weapon – is mirrored in other places. So, on every level we’ve got intolerance of endings or just denial of endings.
James Royal-Lawson
Or the desire to be eternal is built into the fabric at every single level.
Per Axbom
And there’s a whole psychological piece in closure experiences around – like we have a natural repulsion against death, as you can imagine. There’s a book by Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death. And in that, he points out that we all have a repulsion of death. He called it terror management theory, where in a subconscious way, we’re all trying to cheat the longevity of the inevitability I guess of death. So we buy things, we produce things, we make things that are going to outlive us. So you could argue that on one level that’s like having kids, but on other levels it’s things that we make, and we think are gonna outlive us. So I’m making a book, for example, or, like, somebody might make a bit of sculpture, or you might have a passionate view about some sort of right in your country.
James Royal-Lawson
But it’s loss aversion, as well isn’t it? Not just death. I mean, we’ve got that inbuilt mechanism to not want to lose things. Whether it’s lose money on the stock exchange, or whatever it is, to lose your wallet or lose a loved one.
Joe MacLeod
Absolutely. And that’s often stronger than the desire to make things sometimes, so you’re repelled by death more than you are to gain in other areas.
James Royal-Lawson
Especially when something is existing, you’ve got something, then the fear of losing the thing, you’ve got. And now I’m touching my tablet as if that’s the most important thing. Well, to me it is.
Per Axbom
That’s the thing you touch most during the day.
James Royal-Lawson
You’d hope.
Per Axbom
The weird thing about this, I was talking at this sustainability thing a few weeks ago. And it’s interesting, this break we have emotionally about endings and beginnings. We’re all very diverse, very conscious of minute sort of emotional triggers in our beginnings of the customer experience, whether it be a product or service or a digital thing. And we we can navigate all sorts of complexities in that. And the offboarding of stuff, we just totally forget. So, for example, going back to tablets, phones and laptops, you’ll find that you’ve probably got a few generations of phones in drawers, phones live in drawers after they die. And laptops live on shelves.
James Royal-Lawson
Or kids play boxes.
Per Axbom
Yes, or kids play with dead phones in boxes. Because they’re such complicated things to unravel on so many levels. I mean, as soon as you start thinking about like, if I get rid of this, what’s happening to the data? By getting rid of this, what happens to the complex electronics inside, the metals that are need recycling? What happens to all of that? Who does dismantle that? And there’s all sorts of questions around that.
James Royal-Lawson
I think I may have mentioned this example before, but in Swedish I think is a lovely example that heightens the connection to phones: In the 90s the nickname for a mobile phone was the Swedish for teddy bear. Nalle. And that I think is actually excellent way of giving the example. That’s a thing that you cuddle and hold and basically have with you all times. You really really feel anxious and distraught if you’re separated from it or lose contact with that teddy bear. And then, like I said, creates the need for so many offboarding processes. Connection.
Joe MacLeod
Yeah, you do need to add emotion into these offboarding things. The big reason why we need to do that is because the impact on so much of our life now in the biggest sense things with climate change, privacy and social networks and things like mis-selling in in financial services, we can attribute and not really dealing with an offboarding and experience very coherently. So, when we’re dealing with climate change, we’ve been talking about that since the Intergovernmental Panel was made in 1988, like 34 years, what have we done since? Now we even question the need for it. Because we have no vocabulary to challenge it, or just to say, “No, let’s stop all this. Let’s unravel this.” And the same with digital and the same with services. The justice that we don’t see in banking and the service industry, where people get away with outrageous things that you can attribute to not resolving things at the end, that injustice. But man, we do a good starting experience, we can sell all sorts of stuff. And we can have all of these stories around new starts and technology and all of these onboarding.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, I mean, how do you deal with this from from a company point of view? You’ve got all the focus on onboarding, on sales, on customer acquisition, on repeating the customer cycle, or on not letting them drop off it. Because acquisition costs are one of those metrics that, you know, every single company that has a customer base follows The cost of acquisition, growth of customer base, and when you see things dropping, offboarding, that’s a bad thing. It is painted as a bad thing in every single consumer organisation.
Joe MacLeod
And they deal with it so bad, so awfully, when you do offboard. A good example is the gym industry, right? Everyone signs up for a gym in like January, well not everyone but like you’d sign up for a gym in January. And people start to really drop off by like, February, March. It takes like six to eight weeks for people to start dropping that to such a degree that the turnover in that industry is 30 to 50%. So the best gym in the gym industry does 30% turnover. So what they’ve tried to do is stop people leaving by putting mechanisms in place, like legal contracts or poor subscription models. So you can you’re not paying over a certain period of time. But a lot of things to stop people leaving.
Instead, if you approached it and said like, everyone’s gonna leave, the best we can ever do is 30%, then I’m going to create the best leaving experience the gym industry has ever had. And I’m probably in competition with, let’s say, four other gyms in the area. So let’s say one individual starts off in one gym, and you’re going to do the best leaving experience. And they leave after like a few months, and you go like, thanks for coming, like you give them the best leaving onboarding closure experience you can do, they then go to the next gym, and they spend another couple of months there and leave there and they give them a horrible thing. And they trap them in a contract. And they do the same again, all the time, that person’s going, they’ve got a really bad example. And they go tell their friends about this great gym, which gives great off boarding and closure. Within four years, you’re going to have the best reputation in the industry in your area.
So there’s loads of benefits to having that offboarding really put an effort into because people leave your company. If you’re in denial of people leaving and you’re not dealing with that, then you really shouldn’t be having the business because someone’s going to come along with the acknowledgement that people leave. So I’m gonna make that part really good.
Per Axbom
You said that was sort of the key what you just said just there: in four years. I mean, , people don’t plan that far ahead.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s life. And things happen. And you can’t change people’s behaviour en-mass from from an individual gym, then you’re not going to alter that behaviour in the whole marketplace in a short space of time. And it’s very difficult, full stop. So you’ve got to accept reality. And reality is like you said, you know, 35% of people give up.
Joe MacLeod
Yeah. And if you look at the car industry. The Kia cars comes to market in 2007 with a seven year warranty. They say to everyone – , because previous to that everyone’s going “We got very good materials, look at our ball bearings, aren’t they good?” Remember those door ads of the VWs? I mean, who the hell buys a car based on how a door shuts? So the previous model it’s like “good quality materials, these will last” and that most of the time they gave them a three year warranty. Then what? Does this car only last three years? So that’s it, “See you later we don’t care we’re going after another new customer.” Yeah, so Kia comes along, seven year warranty. Now people find it hard to talk about anything beyond five years, as a human it’s hard to sort of think beyond that. It’s why you get that cliche question in a job interview or your or your financial advisor, “what you’re going to do in five years?” So when you start saying this car will last you seven years, you’re talking about end of life, like a thing, an event that you can’t perceive, seven years away. But equally Kia, then have got this event in the future where you’re going to get together with this person. They’re happy, hopefully with their car, you’ve been a good company to them. And you’re ready in the market for a new car? Isn’t that a really clever, sensible acknowledgement of product death? And the potential of getting a really new clear acquisition? Seems a no-brainer to me.
Per Axbom
And you really have to think long term though. You need to argue for that. So is it profit or ethics that’s driving this? What is the call to arms? And what do designers have to do to get into this?
Joe MacLeod
Just going back to Kia cars, if you look at the business model with that, since they introduced it in 2007, they have 1.4 market share, they’re now at 3.4. market share, they’ve doubled their market share in over the period of introducing seven year warranty, and a seven year warranty is that the thing that people come to their company for now. In terms of like, going back to your your question about the other aspects, what’s the point of introducing it, for example, in digital? At the moment, we got this share culture of like, share, share, share, share, share. When things go wrong after you shared something, whether it’s something personal or something, you have very little control over that. You’ve given up a lot of the control or acknowledgement that it’s yours in T’s&C’s, you’ve given in a bad picture or something to someone and they’ve gone off with it. And then inevitably, maybe not inevitably, but one in 11 women in the US have been threatened or experienced revenge porn and they’ve had images of them either put online or threatened to put it online. And at that point, they have to often go to court with their own money to get that stuff removed.
There’s only recently been legislation put in place to deal with revenge porn specifically. And some of the people that are doing it are getting away with murder for ages before that, because we haven’t got this vocabulary about resolving an offboarding or even empowering the individual from each side of the customer lifecycle. So you’re empowering the individual to share, share, share, share. But then when the individual comes back and says, “Please help me I want to unshare,” Apple runs, all of these other companies run because maybe their cloud service was hacked. But if you look in the small print, that’s not their problem anymore, if it is your identity being.
Per Axbom
So you’re making stuff easy, but you’re not presenting the actual outcomes that could potentially happen based on your sharing process. You’re making it too easy to share, you’re reducing that friction but you’re making it too easy.
Joe MacLeod
And so, we often just don’t put those mechanisms or those interfaces in place. And what we should be looking at is “what is an interface for unsharing that image that we’ve spent, probably months, if not years, resolving those nitty gritty details of how to share?”
James Royal-Lawson
What you’ve got that’s really problematic here is that we’ve got so many digital services now that are basing their entire essence on engagement. So we’ve got the race for engagement. You’ve got to click. We’ve got LinkedIn autoplaying videos because they’re counting it as a play without even pressing a button because it increases their engagement figures which makes the stock market happy because they’re a public organisation now that they’ve floated and so on. You know, you’ve got all this drive for clicking and pressing and engaging. That goes completely against closure.
Joe MacLeod
It does, but there is quite a bit of evidence to say people are changing their behaviour because they’re repulsed by the amount of exposure they’re getting on maybe a personal level. So if you look at Facebook, the sharing between 2014 and 2015 fell 5.5%. But underneath that, personal sharing, so like, “Look at us here” or “look at my dinner” or something like that, instead of news, fell 21%. Yet, at the same time, the increase in messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Snapchat, that grew 25%. So what we’re seeing is like, “I want more control back of who I’m sharing stuff with, what I’m doing, and a little bit more…”
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I’ve read this as well, the explanation behind Snapchat’s growth is that it’s seen as more of a closed room. Things auto expire, it gets shared with the people you know, you’re connected to, and there’s no public on Snapchat.
Joe MacLeod
And the more I mean, take that in a different direction, that same argument, if you look at VPN usage slot, one in four people in like, sort of the West assigned to use pins to protect their identity and to place themselves in different I mean, I shouldn’t say that. But like, I’m, I’ve been using a VPN because I’m now in Sweden watching BBC News. Right?
Per Axbom
I use a VPN everyday.
James Royal-Lawson
I use a VPN.
Joe MacLeod
Actually one of the things coming out of Sweden was that, if you looked at Sweden’s VPN usage, you would think that they’re all ghosts watching Netflix.
James Royal-Lawson
The thing is with VPNs, it doesn’t actually mask. It’s a placebo. Reallly, you think it kind of stops you from being tracked. But the organization’s now who are good at doing cross-device tracking, it doesn’t matter because they’re so good at picking up the fingerprints. You can go through VPN, and they still got, “Well, actually.”
Per Axbom
You still need to block the trackers. There’s so much tracking going on anyway.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, you can’t, it’s almost impossible, because every single time you collect a webpage from a web server, you give a huge amount of information to it. And you can’t block all of that, because they require you to send requests.
Joe MacLeod
It’s almost a cold war between the consumer and the provider. We’ve been giving so much information away as individuals and we’re starting to become more and more aware of that. And what we’ve created is a load of casual criminals who are like, “I shouldn’t be using a VPN that hides my identity cos that allows me to watch things in the country, which I’m meant to pay a licence or fee for, you know, you’re doing this casual sort of small level criminal activities. So yeah, coming back to the to closure, if we don’t start having a more honest ending, and allowing people to have more control over their content, their identity and a full sort of conclusion to that story of consumption, I think we’ll have a lot more difficult problems. And even if you look at the more recently, evidence coming out from research, of saying self esteem in young adults in the UK is going down, and particularly more aggressively going down in in women. So we’re exposing ourselves to this sort of almost left Thalidomide epidemic through digital and self esteem and that mental health thing we’re really undermining. Another thing on that, when do you think the first diagnosis, proper medical diagnosis, was of hoarding, digital hoarding?
Per Axbom
Medical diagnosis of digital hoarding?
James Royal-Lawson
I that actually a thing, that they do do that sub categorization of digital hoarding?
Per Axbom
Yeah, and surprisingly only in 2015. So less than two years ago, digital hoarding was diagnosed. And I think that suspiciously, we need to grapple with digital behaviour and mental health and that to really start dealing with some of the consequences of…
James Royal-Lawson
Then, again, everything’s built up. I think now we’ve like photo services now. We’ve got Google Photos, you’ve got your iCloud and so on. They’re all designed from the bottom up to make sure you don’t lose anything.
Joe MacLeod
Yeah, but it’s a matter of like, consciously what we consume at one end of the customer lifecycle, and we don’t have the vocabulary to offboard or resolve that stuff at the other end of the customer lifecycle. So for example, if you look at Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s book “Delete.” Have you ever read that?
Per Axbom
No.
Joe MacLeod
So he talks about, like, cost of storage, and how now it’s become so so so cheap to store content, that when we take a photograph, or like I take a few of the image, I think it might be blurry, so I’ll take a few images. And the cost is so cheap now they he says the three seconds it takes to choose has to become too expensive for people to use. So it’s easier for me not to even bother editing my photos down because it’s so cheap to just store all of the imagery.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
And that brings me to a question. Maybe I’ve watched too much Black Mirror but nevermind. Do we ultimately need closure anymore? Because given what we’ve talked about, the rapid move towards, you know, archiving on a scale that mankind has never ever experienced and everything is driving us towards not finishing things off, not finishing. And data storage is becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, we’re taking more more photos, we’re getting probably quite rapidly to the point where we can maybe take a backup of people. And then you maybe even get to the point where you could have a virtual representation of a loved one, a lost relative or so on, after they’ve died, which is very, very good at interacting with you. So do we need closure in the future?
Joe MacLeod
This is I think the difference, is that we could, as you point out, store all of this stuff. Or, we could edit it down and work out what’s worth storing. So, with a description, you’re talking the difference between archiving antiques in somewhere special, which will look after them or like the difference between an enormous landfill where we don’t give a monkey’s about anything, just storing everything forever. A good example of that is on the App Store. If you look on the App Store, out of the 23 different categories you get on the App Store in the genre lists. When you do a search, you only really search the top 300-odd. So the search actually doesn’t go deep, very much. And so if you’re outside of that top 300, you’re not really searched for very coherently.
And a company called Adjust – a research company, they’ve done some work on this and said that about 80% on there – they call them zombie apps, these apps that don’t get searched, Adjust do, and they reckon 80% of apps on the App Store are zombie apps. Now Apple came back to this like, I think last year, and they started cutting a lot of the dead apps. Some of the apps hadn’t been touched since 2015, or something, and they only cleared 20% out. So really, if you look at the App Store, you have got some nice things in there. But if you go deeper and deeper, you’re looking at this vast wasteland of digital assets that are no good to anyone, they’re not a high quality, they haven’t been looked after, and there’s maybe not many people on them.
And we’re creating this landscape of rubbish that we could clean out a lot more coherently. Otherwise we’re gonna leave these lingering assets that will undermine ourselves and our future. And if you took it on a personal level, and the assets that we create, as we grow up, become teenagers, they’re stored super robustly for everyone to look at forever and ever. Is that waste? Or is that coherent archiving? I think it’s probably a massive landscape of undermining waste.
James Royal-Lawson
It’d be a whole second show, but I was thinking about the way that through surfacing items in your digital archive, you shape your memories of the past. Because it used to be the case that you remembered things through remembering them. Whereas now it’s kind of like Facebook throws up a memory from four years ago, and in primes you, triggers you to remember that thing. And over time you learn it’s that you remember, not the original memory, because of course you remember the most recent time you’ve thought of something. So your whole memory is being framed by services spitting out memories to you from the archive.
Joe MacLeod
I think there’s an interesting analogy – between when the printing press was invented and now, there’s loads of interesting things. One of the things that came about when the printing press was invented, was that ageism started. Previously to the printing press being invented, people would go to the oldest person in the village as a wise sage to chat to them about what happened then, or how did this work in the past? But the printing press came along and started documenting everything. After they messed around with bibles for a bit, they started making more instruction-type learned manuals, old people then started getting pushed back down the pecking order of interest. And you think about what’s happening now, the way we archive absolutely everything. The level of quality maybe, is getting undermined of archiving.
Per Axbom
I would love for us to end on a piece of advice for the UX designers out there listening, because I’m in complete agreement with the problem here. And I’m trying to figure out well, what do we as product managers and UXers, what do we have to do to change this? Because I think we’re in sort of the best position, we have an understanding of humans, the human problems, and we could do more, but where do we start? How do we find the arguments to actually get buy-in for this?
Joe MacLeod
So firstly, I know how hard it is to sell this sort of thing. It’s a super difficult thing to put up against the business people in your organisations. With the example of the gym thing I talked about earlier, if you’re talking about endings then that’s a massive step forward. Because you’ve all experienced emotional endings in the past. We’ve all broken up with people or known loved ones who’ve died. So we’ve got those emotional triggers in, we just need to start pushing them into how we design. So you’re halfway there already. Now start thinking about what the offboarding experience is of your product or service. One thing I think is a simple thing to explain it, and a compelling exercise to do, I call it Five by Five. So if you can take your product and honestly say that it’s going to be exactly the same thing it is now in five years, then I’m going to see how much I need to put a little bit of effort into the project to think about things in five years out. So 5% of your project time on five years out, then you’ll start asking real, honest questions about endings and closure and offboarding.
[Music]
Per Axbom
I think closure can be a lot of different things. So it’s closure when you actually end the relationship in something as acute as death. But it could also be a closure of single point micro interactions, where you actually make a decision, you perhaps buy something and you have regrets, and you you want to go back on that decision. And the interface or the service or whatever it allows you to do that without any questions asked. I was thinking of return policies in Sweden, we have a 14-day return policy, no questions asked, whatever you buy across the country. I don’t know how that translates to different countries. But the reason for that, of course, is that people make mistakes, people don’t always understand the outcome of the choices they’re making. So you need to give them some time to actually go back and redo that or have regrets.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, I think this is an example of how these different strengths of bonds. I mean, closure is the end of a relationship. So the example Joe gave with share buttons, ad the example you gave about returning products, they’re weaker bonds, you’ve had a very, very short relationship. So closure in those situations, it can be much more simple in those situations, because it’s not a complex relationship. But if you’ve been using a service for several years, and at the end of that period, you don’t need to use it anymore, or don’t want to use it anymore, for whatever reason the relationship has come to an end. Then the closure you need in those situations will be quite different to unsharing an item from Facebook.
Per Axbom
Well, I think some other point he’s making – because it’s not necessarily a short-term relationship, it could be like with the gym memberships, it’s just that the specific interaction was short lived. But it could be that you’ve had a long term relationship, but just this specific product, you wanted to return it. And you didn’t like it. But you keep talking about it because he got such a nice exit. But that’s more of an exit than a closure. I agree with that.
James Royal-Lawson
I’m not disagreeing with you, Per, but I’m just saying that there’s different depths of relationships. You still need to get closure and you still need to end it in a good way that’s good for both of you. And exactly as you say, you don’t want negative consequences just because you brought a product back, you brought the product back maybe because it was the wrong size. I mean, it doesn’t have to be because it was rubbish, right.
Per Axbom
And you may buy there again and in many years to come just because you got that good experience of returning it.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. But then, what we just talked about there isn’t closure. Because if you’re still gonna have a relationship with that organisation, you’re gonna buy another shirt from it or buy some other clothing, then that maybe an end of a transaction, one transaction, but not the end of the relationship.
Per Axbom
No, I absolutely agree.
James Royal-Lawson
So I think we’ve got to remember that there are lots of levels to closure and what we’re talking about. Are we talking about offboarding as a customer completely – “this is the end of my relation with this brand on his organisation.” Or is it micro-closure, is it closure of something less deep that we’re talking about? But I really like this, because it makes me think about lots of economic and business issues to deal with this. I mentioned during the interview, organisations are completely built up for add-on sales and for closing (closing?), closing sales and keeping a customer, retention and minimising the cost of customer acquisition or all these different metrics and stats. And that’s not always how life is, not always how we are.
And I think we’ve definitely a trend here in Sweden with companies moving away from having like 12-month contracts, 24-month contracts, because they’ve started to see the business value in flexibility. That you know, people feel more safe with one month’s notice in the contracts, rolling contracts. It doesn’t feel as stressful as… you know, you don’t have that anguish and that kind of cloud hanging over you for two years, when you realise, “No, this actually didn’t really work out as I thought it would.”
Per Axbom
It’s nice, exactly what you said there: It’s called closing the deal. And many companies look at that, when you close the deal, that’s the end of the relationship because then you’ve got your money. But really, you need to look at the outcome far, far, way beyond that.
James Royal-Lawson
But I think from a UX point of view, we’re gonna have a lot easier time getting closure for the weaker bonds – for the regret-type situations, or the kind of undo type situations. I think that’s gonna be a lot easier for us to get included in websites, products and services. The bigger closures, you know, for example if you want to delete your Uber account. That kind of closure is going to be a lot more difficult to get buy-in.
Per Axbom
it is actually. You’re right.
James Royal-Lawson
Because you’re swimming upstream against the sales and business fabric of a lot of these organisations.
Per Axbom
Plus people hate to think about the end of relationships. That’s not what they’re about.
James Royal-Lawson
Which is one of the core things of Joe’s talk and the book. That we’ve moved away from closure because of the accelerated pace of change that we’ve gone through now. And, you know, as I a bit cheekily brought up, maybe we don’t need closure in the future.
Per Axbom
Yes, that’s an interesting point as well.
James Royal-Lawson
But I think we do just now. I think we need to put more time into being more open and honest about how life is and how we should help people instead of making it awkward for people to get closure.
Per Axbom
Yeah, not having closure and big data and all the possibilities there is a whole other show. So show notes, links from this episode, available at:
James Royal-Lawson
uxpodcast.com.
Per Axbom
And if you’re not already a subscriber, then please add us to wherever you are listening to us right now. And if you are, then just tell a friend about the show, I guess. Thank you for taking the time to listen. Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Knock knock.
Per Axbom
Who’s there?
James Royal-Lawson
Design.
Per Axbom
Design who?
James Royal-Lawson
Design said beware of dogs.
Per Axbom
(Laughter)
James Royal-Lawson
God. They don’t get any better, these.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Joe MacLeod recorded in March 2017 and published as episode 258 of UX Podcast.