Computer voice
Season Three, Episode Five

[Music]

Per Axbom
You’re polluting other people’s actual devices.

James Royal-Lawson
You’re dumping waste and not caring about it.

James Royal-Lawson
Hi, I’m James

Per Axbom
and I’m Per.

James Royal-Lawson
And this is UX podcast, balancing business, technology, people and society since 2011 and with listeners old and new all over the world, from Ukraine to Palestine.

Per Axbom
Nice. And today we have for you a link show when we get to just mouth off about the things that we find on our digital travels

James Royal-Lawson
And we’re traveling all over the place. But so what two have we got today then Per?

Per Axbom
We have, the first one is six things that slow down your site’s UX and why you have no control over them, by Tammy Everts.

James Royal-Lawson
And the second one is fail early, the hidden design principle behind great UX, by Niaw de Leon.

Per Axbom
So let’s dive into what mine first Okay, so, so Tammy Evers is the chief experience officer at speed curve. So this is a company blog, and so obviously they’re speaking from experience here and have a service around these things, this speed metrics and stuff like that, for your website. But what really appealed to me about this article was that it overlaps with a lot of the things we talk about quite often, in that we as designers often have this perfect setup in which we design things. And the usual example of that is we have big, nice screens that we design, beautiful interfaces in, and when other people use those same interfaces within their more compact or or actually older screens, it doesn’t look as good. And that used to be the prime example.

James Royal-Lawson
Sorry, Per. You think about the classic kind of design delivery meetings where, where a designer comes in and they’ve got their MacBook, high end Macbook.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
You’re sat in Stockholm with super fast internet. And then they, you know, they present this on giant screens and so on. It’s, it’s not representative.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. And what you said right there is, with super fast internet, the sense that we kind of ignore how costly some of these designs are when it comes to high end graphics, which actually take a lot of space on hard drives and by extension, then, of course, also take up a lot of space in your broadband wiring, which means that they can be quite slow for a lot of people. And this is sort of what this article gets into. And Tammy has this expression where she says that you have control over the design and code for the pages on your site, and a decent amount of control over the first and middle mile of the network your pages travel over, like how she puts this, because you can sort of think about it as distance.

So you have control over how far away your website is from the person, to an extent, but when it comes to the last mile, she says, or more specifically, the last few feet, matters are no longer in your hands. And what she’s saying there is really that you have no control of what’s happening on well, from the cable, from it coming into your users internet, into their house, to their computer, and what’s actually happening on their computer in terms of how slow it is, how old it is, what the screen is like, as we were mentioning, but also what software they’re using, if it’s an old web browser and stuff like that.

James Royal-Lawson
So, let’s pause a second there, then let’s kind of rewind that little bit and convert some of these to metrics so that European listeners can at least understand. So yeah, so what we’re saying there is you’ve you hosting a service or a website, and you have control over what’s hosted somewhere, and I guess she’s also saying that you have then control about other ,the way you would kind of start those pages and services on their journey through maybe a content delivery network, I guess. Or, or maybe clusters of servers, yeah, or clusters of servers, or whatever load bounces you’ve got, you’ve got control over stuff when you kind of like, set it sailing on its journey, and then after that it gets, kind of reasonably difficult, doesn’t it? Maybe you have control over what kind of bandwidth you have at certain points in that as well, if you pay for some of it. But ultimately, yeah, the bit that gets difficult, you have absolutely zero control over how congested a pipe is once it gets to someone’s house, if there’s a lot of people at home that day using, you know, the internet, and then when it comes to their actual hardware, yeah, there’s just so little you can do about that.

Per Axbom
Yeah, and sometimes we do this software testing where we sort of try to simulate a bad connection. But the problem with those simulations, of course, is that you’re just simulating something that under perfect circumstances, is exactly that speed or whatever, you’re simulating a modem of a certain kind. But what you were saying, there you may be many people in a household. I actually had lunch with a guy that today who did some tests with when Taylor Swift was playing at a concert, and she had a teenager compare Tiktok speeds posting something on Tiktok at the concert compared to what it was like per usual, usually posting a Tiktok video takes about two seconds, whereas at the Taylor Swift concert, it took five minutes, implying that there are so many phones on the network posting things that it’s just impossible to get through. So those are the types of differences you have to think about, where are my customers or clients or users at and where so what’s happening to their connection? What could be the context that they’re in.

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly they, they themselves, might be moving like on a public transport network and so on, where these variable things, variable speeds, are going to be available to them during that journey. But it also might be like I said that, you know, they’re in a they’re in a tightly built up city center, maybe an apartment block with lots of other people, and they may be using mobile internet, and there’s too many people there, too many people on the network, like you say, so it’s congested and slows things down for them there.

Per Axbom
Yeah. And then there’s the fact that on that computer that a family is using, they may have many applications open, and it may be an old computer. So it’s there are so many things, and there actually, actually lists, some things and with stats, which I really love about this article as well. It gets really concrete around, what are we missing when we’re thinking about how people use our websites? So there’s the end user connection speed that we’ve talked a bit about, now I want to jump down onto older hardware. I love this because it’s an old, I think it’s called a duplex modem right? on that picture.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s an acoustic coupler.

Per Axbom
It’s an acoustic coupler is what it’s called

James Royal-Lawson
Acoustic, acoustic coupler. I’ve never pronounce it better. Yeah, when you used to stick your handset…so the micro, the speakers in the in the telephone, then transmitted the noise into microphones that were in the… or the coupling device.

Per Axbom
It’s the one used in the movie War Games.

Per Axbom
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.

Per Axbom
So your, your users won’t be, won’t be having that, or using that, but they may be using, like ISDN matters, or at least hardware that’s quite old, and so they may have they met as the article points aside, they may have a fast connection, but this the hardware that they use for that connection may actually not be able to utilize the full extent of it, which is really interesting.

James Royal-Lawson
I think Wi Fi routers is a great example here. I mean, we, you know, you see this quite a lot, that maybe you’ve got a slightly older Wi Fi router that doesn’t have the latest standards, or can’t cope with the latest…

Per Axbom
exactly yes

James Royal-Lawson
…protocols, so they’re already limited to, maybe, I don’t know, I say, 10 Meg transmission, and then you’ve got three or four of you using that network at home, suddenly you’re down to kind of quite slow speeds for doing stuff. And that doesn’t have to be kind of like super old. I mean, it doesn’t have to be an acoustic coupler from like, 40 years ago. It could be something that’s only five years old, but you, you know, you just maybe didn’t, you weren’t aware of what you needed to buy. Yeah, you bought something new. Surely it was going to be the best and fastest, .

Per Axbom
Exactly. And then there are some stats about older desktop and mobile devices, and this is something I think I’ve started noticing more and more that people just don’t buy new computers anymore because they’re buying new phones, and the phones are just as expensive as the computers used to be. So people are keeping their computers. So if they’re ever on a computer, many people are using one that’s at least five years old, and often more

James Royal-Lawson
If they don’t have one through work. Yeah, I’m seeing you see more and more that people or families just don’t own their own anymore. Yes, everyone get their own mobile device. May be a tablet, but when it comes to laptops, and I know a few families where it’s only work laptops, there’s no personal ones anymore.

Per Axbom
Yeah, and she points out, well, the life cycle replacement, or the replacement cycle for phones, is probably a bit shorter, but it’s also also lengthening, because people are becoming more aware of how it affects the environment that you’re constantly replacing your phone, so more and more people are keeping their phones for longer. You have to start paying attention to this. And then what kind of blew my mind, actually, was the fourth point here about browser version,

James Royal-Lawson
this actually made my eyebrows raised slightly as well.

Per Axbom
Yeah, because there are way more people using old versions of Chrome, Google Chrome, the browser than you may think. So some are still using, she says, Chrome 39 which was released in 2014 so that’s how far back you need to be thinking. These stats are from stat counter, by the way. So that’s the source for these, these stats.

James Royal-Lawson
I was, well, I was just going to say about the browser versions there, that kind of made me start to think about, Well, what happened there? Because the chrome and edge and a lot of the browsers now, opera and so on, they all update automatically.

Per Axbom
Exactly, that’s what I was thinking as well, automatically in the background

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, even in… even in kind of more controlled IT environments. You know, they generally are updating these browsers now a lot, lot quicker than they used to be. I mean, going back 15 years or so, then you had to wait for IT departments to package and approve things and roll them out. So it could be, it could be years before versions got, you know, some of the public sector places we’ve worked, me and you have both worked with Per, they’ve had very, very old browsers back in the day, but now, though even those are updating regularly. So this was a real surprising thing to read, for me, that there was, there was still, I guess, places that were either decoupled or, you know, or had, for some reason, it doesn’t go into the reasons, but I guess maybe there could be very specific reasons why browsers can’t be updated or or maybe just something’s broken and the person doesn’t know how to fix it.

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
Because it stopped updating.

Per Axbom
Because she gets into adware, the computer being infected, and plugins that you may have installed too many so the browser actually stops behaving the way it should be behaving. I remember seeing this with, I mean, people having many, many tabs open at the same time.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s me. That’s me

Per Axbom
I know, but you have a very modern computer. On the other hand.

James Royal-Lawson
I don’t have one browser and I don’t have one computer. I’ve got hundreds of them everywhere. Chrome keeps introducing new things to try and kind of like, enable my bad behavior. I mean, now they’re automatically moving tabs out of the way on my mobile that I haven’t used in 30 days. So now there’s a there’s a pile of stuff that’s sweeping under the carpet. Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent. Sorry,

Per Axbom
No, but that was actually part of the next point. That was browser use and abuse is what she gets into, which is all the multiple windows and tabs, the malware I mentioned, the browser extensions I mentioned, but also cache and cookie overload in that people actually don’t clear their cache and cookies regularly, if at all. So these files can pile up, slow down the browser.

James Royal-Lawson
That one is really interesting, the cache and cookie overload, because there you said, and I’m reading the article, most people don’t clear their cache and cookies. Now, I mean, if it’s okay, Per, I’m going to get into, like, what can we do?

Per Axbom
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
Because this is something which, over the years, if I’ve been working on something where we’re sun setting, a feature, you know, something is getting removed. It does happen occasionally. It’s not often that things get removed, but there are times when we’ve managed to say, look, we’re not having that anymore, we’re taking it out. And if we’ve then realized that, that feature has made use of cookies or local storage, or has kept things on a computer, then I’ve tried to make sure that we program in tidying up of that. So in the version that you push out, that’s the first one without the feature, you have code then that checks if the cookies exists and deletes it. So you actually move your junk because it’s seeing as soon as the features gone that made use of that cookie or that that storage item, it’s decoupled, it’s lost.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
And then you are dumping that task on the user. The person has to clear their cache or cookies or buy a new computer to get rid of that little bit of text. Okay, it’s a tiny piece of text, but, but when you think about all the websites you visit and all the things you do and all the stuff that’s never thrown into the bin. It’s like a teenage bedroom full of stuff everywhere.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, this is such a good point. James, get rid of your own junk. You’re putting junk out there and you’re not taking care of it. It’s like pollution. It’s really pollution. You’re polluting.

James Royal-Lawson
It is.

Per Axbom
You’re polluting other people’s actual devices.

James Royal-Lawson
You’re dumping waste and not caring about it. I mean, this shouldn’t be a big ask, really, just this tidying up thing, because when it comes to cookie consent, then if people withdraw their consent, then you should be tidying this stuff up anyway. So the kind of the mechanism to do this shouldn’t be kind of shocking to organization. You should be able to talk about it and kind of extend it. But I admit it’s not that often features get sunset, but bear in mind, if they do

Per Axbom
Oh yeah, definitely take care. And the final one is other applications, in the sense that people don’t think about that, if other software is hogging your CPU, then web performance will be affected as well, or web browsing performance will be affected as well. So there could be, I love the example here that is anti virus software. So Well, actually, the point is that there could be scans of incoming files constantly to try and identify malware, and that, of course, puts a heavy load on your computer, and actually slows down your surfing experience, which, which could be your user, and you’re not even aware of this

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. I mean, I know that the some of the slowest moments I ever have on on this computer are if I’ve been away for a week or so, and I come back and it starts up, and Windows does its full file scan or whatever, and it can take a long while, and it really slows things down.

Per Axbom
exactly. And what I really appreciate about this article, of course, as well, in the end, it’s not just pointing out all these issues, and Tammy is also telling us, these are the takeaways. These are the things you can start to try and encounter all of these problems. So if you ever needed another reason to optimize your pagers, this is it. Of course, you need to be thinking about optimizing your images, your JavaScript, etc, etc. This will all impact the user experience. And then it’s funny, because you mentioned, in the beginning, you mentioned the content delivery network. And of course, a lot of websites don’t think about this. But if you do apply and have a content delivery network, then you will actually also provide a shorter distance to your user after accessing your website, which itself, of course, could improve, improve performance. And don’t rely on only all these virtual testing tools. Of course, try and understand and test in the real world, basic UX stuff, of course, but sometimes we just rely on these tools so much because they look so pretty and they look so real, because it says, it said that it’s testing the speed, and that’s, this is what it looks like, and it’s fine.

James Royal-Lawson
This one, actually, this point, got me thinking about because, like some of the things, these points, the first ones anyway, they’re not really, they’re not completely designers that are going to be sorting out these things. I mean, optimizing your page, some aspect of that, maybe we have an influence in to do with, like, you know, images and so on, that we how we design that aspect pages. But a lot of the stuff that you listed there is more the kind of under the hood technical it’s the engineers are going to be working on it, as is the content delivery network.

Per Axbom
But it’s great to be aware of it, because then you could ask these questions.

James Royal-Lawson
You can you can raise the questions, but the user monitoring, so understanding what environment people are dealing with and what kind of speeds are they’re suffering from, I guess here is something I thought, well, oh, well, surely, surely the network information API has moved on now, and because that’s something’s been around for, I think it was, when was it? It’s over a decade. It’s quite a long time it’s existed, but it’s been slow to be adopted. And I’ve always been a bit frustrated about why the network information API API has been slow to be adopted, because the idea of that specification is it lets you, it lets the browser tell you, as a web page, what speed, what connection someone’s got, you know, what response they’ve got. So you can, you can maybe then adjust your web page to adapt to their environment, which is from a UX point of view, this has been absolutely beautiful that, yeah, if I can see that your your bandwidth is really low then, or you’ve you’ve enabled saving data mode, I’m going to respect that, and I’m going to, kind of like, adjust my site to give you a better experience to be resilient, to survive. But it kind of half died in the water. Did all this, because people started to realize you could do fingerprinting using this information.

Per Axbom
Right, yeah of course.

James Royal-Lawson
So, so for example, but they’ve, they’ve done it so that some of the information is still there. I mean, you can, but it’s very skewed towards non Apple users, sadly, that you’ve got effective speed type and down the link speed and response time. These are available through API, and they’ve been, they’ve been set as a low max. So like 4g is the max speed, and 10 of effective type of connection, 10 Meg is the is the fastest speed. And I think three, three seconds latency is the fast, is the slowest response time. So basically, they’ve kept, they’ve kept the data that’s sent to try and reduce the chances of fingerprinting, right? And it’s implemented in Chrome, edge, opera, those browsers, it’s all, it’s all there and available, but it’s not available in iOS, Safari or MacOS.

Per Axbom
Okay, because of privacy reasons is what you’re saying.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s what they’re arguing, yeah, you know, but I think it’s sad because, you know, we’ve, because of the reason we’ve just been talked about, we can, you know, we can, we should, from a UX point of view, this is something that’d be really valuable information for us to do better, you know, experiences create better experiences.

Per Axbom
And from all design perspective, you can think of it as a responsive design. It’s a responsive design not based on page width is based… it’s a responsive design based on speed.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.

Per Axbom
Which is really cool. And we’d actually love to be able to do that.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, I think it’s been, I think it’s a reasonable compromise, without going into exactly how you can… when you think about all the other things you can fingerprint, I think these, these maximums that they’ve set and stuff, you know, and the way they round it as well. I think it’s, I think it’s a good balance. It feels like that.

Per Axbom
I haven’t looked into it as much as you have, so I’m not going to say either for or against yet.

James Royal-Lawson
It was one of my rabbit holes I dived into when you sent me the link. So it will be in the show notes. You can look at my little little demo I made of it as well to to help test the network API

Per Axbom
And the final message from Tammy is this that, and I love how she gets into statistics now, in that, don’t just look at the median of your user base. Look at the 75th and 95th percentile. And what she’s really saying, of course, is that treat your edge cases as real users, if you pay attention to their needs, you will actually create a better experience for everyone.

James Royal-Lawson
Second one is my article. This one fail early the hidden design principle behind great UX. This is by Niaw De Leon, independent UX consultant, author of a book seven or eight years ago now called microcopy.

Per Axbom
I remember that one, I think.

James Royal-Lawson
But yeah, now it’s, it’s an interesting one. Of course, it’s interesting one because I’ve picked it to talk about. Well, what you know, he’s highlighting in this article, which is not, she doesn’t mean fail fast, you know, as in fail fast break things from startup culture. She says that very beginning. What she means by this is communicating that something, a product, a service, whatever can’t be provided as early as possible. And I’ll quote from an article here that, in a way, failing early is an extension of the UX heuristic visibility of system status, which advises us to present feedback to the user as quickly as possible in order to create trust through predictable interactions. Nice principle, so failing early versus failing late.

Now, the example in the article here is being given, the first example, anyways, is of a restaurant of comparing how you would fail late in a restaurant experience compared to failing early in a restaurant experience. So the failing late example, you arrive at the restaurant, you take a seat, you browse the menu, you order the food from the waiter or waitress. You wait maybe 15 minutes, because you know you’ve delivered your order, they’ve gone off and they’re starting to prepare it, but then someone comes back and goes, well, actually, the salted fish fried rice dish you ordered is unavailable. Okay, now I have to have to order something new now, so you change your order, you wait another 20 minutes for the food to arrive, and then the food arrives, but you know, you get told that, sorry that the dumplings have run out. So yeah, now, now you’re angry, yeah, because I guess a lot of this information could have been delivered to you earlier.

Per Axbom
Such a great example, because a lot of people have been through something similar, I think.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, So the failing early example then would be you take a seat, and then you get told by your server, sorry, but salted fish rice, fried rice and dumplings are unavailable today. And then you can decide whether you want to leave or stay before you even take in your order that is kind of just, I think it’s really good example. Just show you, kind of how you invest time, and you know, you get your you become more and more invested in this experience, and you’re getting deeper into it. She even mentioned sunk cost fallacy in the in the article, as well as a side track.

Per Axbom
Because in the first example, you would also want to leave, if that was your decision. In the second example, but in a fail late example, you feel like you can’t leave.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah well, in the first example, I mean, you’ve already got some of your food. Some of your food arrives, and at that point you’re told, well, not all your food is going to arrive because some of its run out. You’re actually trapped because, I mean, that puts you in a very awkward, even social situation. Can you…

Per Axbom
–or contractual?

James Royal-Lawson
Can you leave at that point or not? It’s yeah, so we’re probably even causing anxiety as well.

Per Axbom
But it also makes you think, can I save the user experience at that point, if the server themself weren’t informed, could I have saved the user experience by offering other things? So that’s that’s too big of an issue right now.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that we’ll get to something related to that soon. But leading on from this one, she gives us another example of where food delivery apps, that they quite often will ask you for your location, like upfront, or really, really soon in the experience. And what she says there, is well, that that allows them by asking where you are and can we have your location, that then gives them the possibility to filter out or downplay restaurants or food options that aren’t currently available given where you are, they don’t serve your location, or they’re kind of, they’re not driving, you know, they’re not gonna deliver that far away from from where they are, and so on. So, so that’s, that’s another tangible example, many of us probably do have these food ordering apps. So you can think about how it does ask for that and does allow it to customize your experience.

Per Axbom
It could actually tell me how much of the money I am paying for this service is actually being forwarded to the human being doing the service, in which case I would probably fail and not order.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah. She… the example also gives here how you would maybe communicate that practically so rather than making things vanish, the example she shows then communicates that things are available by other means, the screenshot that’s on the web page does actually use a very, very light gray to signal that things are unavailable, which, from an accessibility point of view, you wouldn’t do. You’d have a different pattern to the one shown in the article. But I still do like, I still do like the idea of signaling things are unavailable, because something temporary is good as in, you know, maintaining them in your screen, but, but signaling that they’re unavailable because if you, if you actually remove them because of temporary issues, you’re then potentially creating confusion, because you get to think, Well, I’m sure that was there a minute ago, or, you know, that was their last time I looked so so by, by kind of signaling that something’s unavailable just now, then you’re actually helping people understand and relate to what they’ve already learned, behavior from previous experience. It’s a slightly different thing, if you’ve, if you think, if you want to hide something because of a configuration or because of settings, then that’s different. Then I think you’ve then said, I don’t want to see that. Okay, we’ll not show you that. Then you don’t have to clutter up space by kind of like, the signaling that it’s just unavailable. It’s just going to get it out the way. I don’t want to see it.

So, two interesting aspects of design there, but there’s more examples on the page, she goes through some financial ones too. And one on the financial ones there is that a service is not available because we have now many services that we use that aren’t just kind of front end services. They’re just they’re just the kind of last layer in a chain of things and behind the service, or maybe multiple other dependencies other people’s services. We’re connecting things via APIs, left, right and center. So in order to perform something you need maybe several systems to be working. So it could be that just now you can’t, you can’t, you know, make a transfer to that bank because their API service is down and so on.

Per Axbom
Exactly

James Royal-Lawson
Which makes me kind of think about that, that side of the complicated world we’ve ended up in where you might, it might be very difficult for you to actually communicate lack of availability in your interface at the point you are because other services… you were depending on other services, communicating the status all the way up. It’s kind of like the whispering game that you know, will the original message, will the detail and the actual full explanation from the originator make it all the way to your interface so you can communicate it in a in a good way.

Per Axbom
Right, and these are things you need to think about when you’re building the service,

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly, yeah. And also think about if you want to fail early, because it might be very difficult for you to fail early in a in an understandable way. I had a experience a while ago where I was trying to help my son buy something using Xbox on his on his gaming computer, he was it was buying a he wanted to buy subscription or something. I can’t remember the details. I didn’t need to know the details, but he couldn’t do it. We were putting in the card details, and it was saying declined. I said, well, but I know there’s money on the account. I know it’s supposed to I mean, I don’t understand why it’s declining it.

So I ended up having to chat to the bank. The bank was saying, well, we can see there’s been attempts. Sorry, the bank said we can’t see there’s been any attempts. No one’s tried to take any money. So we haven’t declined anything. So okay, but it’s saying it’s declined. No, well, no, it’s not us declining it, is what the bank said. So kind of thinking, and I’m googling, I’m searching, I’m digging for information. Eventually I found out, I realized that it was, it was family settings that I’d installed on an actual Xbox when you know, the kids were really young. It was a physical Xbox, and I did some kind of configuration of family security… probably purchase settings or whatever. And when this had migrated across various things

Per Axbom
So it was an old card of yours?

James Royal-Lawson
No, no. It was an old setting on the export setting that had been you know, when they’d migrated accounts and then you logged in via windows. This setting was still active, but the message wasn’t getting through to the interface. The interface was just saying, declined because I was trying to play by a card. But what actually was the underlying problem was I needed to turn off an option in the family settings to make it allow for him to be allowed to buy things on his profile. And that didn’t come across. So I would, it wasn’t, you know, it was failing quite late, because it was right at the purchase point, but it was also also failing very, very… it was failing incorrectly, and I was, it was saying it was giving me the wrong failure reason. So it was utterly unhelpful. I’m not sure. Actually. I mean, designing that better is very, very complex, because, like I said, you’ve got so many independent systems and and you know, knowing what you’re going to get is going to be a challenge. I think in some situations.

Per Axbom
I think also sometimes people build independencies that make your thing fail through a third party when it shouldn’t have to fail. I’m now thinking of QR codes going to a bitly link that goes forward after that. So if you you can sometimes just eliminate the third party or build it so that it works even if the third party isn’t functional at the present time. So there are many of those things that you tend to not think about because you expect all services to just be up for some reason.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, what you’d really like from a user perspective, you’d really like something a bit more than you know this service is temporarily unavailable because that doesn’t actually help you. It’s informing you, but it’s not actually helping you. What will be, will be more helpful is if it said this service is temporary and available, it’s estimated to be back in three hours.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
or we don’t know when this is coming back. Why don’t you try this so you actually, you actually help them go forward. Which, which actually also makes me think of something, because that thought came up quite a few times when I was reading the article about, you know, in many e commerce situations, we’ve had a lot of history of optimization in, you know, recent years, where you know you be, you have so many alternative options forced upon you. You know, you’re not allowed to let the customer get away. You know, make them, make them convert, make them get a sale. And that kind of is a different angle to what she’s talking about in this article, here we’re trying to, you know, make the experience better by communicating when things aren’t going to work, whereas in like, some of the optimization cycles, you’ll be expected to, kind of like, seize an opportunity, push an opportunity.

Per Axbom
Exactly

James Royal-Lawson
So they’re related, but, but I think we can, you know, we can definitely do better UX here without being too pushy. But I think for me, a good example is there’s a there’s an online pharmacy here in Sweden, Apotea, and what they do if a, if a product is out of stock, see, normally, on a page of… product listing page, they’d have ‘buy’ would be the button all over the place for every product, you can press buy, and it would add it to your cart. Now, if you, if a product isn’t available, instead of saying buy, it says more info. And then, if you visit the product page, on the product page, if you can get the product, it will say buy. If you can’t here, it will say, watch.

Per Axbom
Oh yeah, I like those as well.

James Royal-Lawson
If you click on that option you then can enter your email address and it will, they will notify you when it’s back in stock. Another thing I actually like with Apoteas solution there is it actually says we will only keep your email address, basically until we’ve informed you. You don’t have to create an account for it. You don’t have to get none that kind of stuff. It’s literally it will, will do, will monitor this for you now, and we’ll send you an email back in the stock. So it feels that that’s always felt a bit like a good service, rather than pushy sales

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
And, you know, quite.. it’s reasonably clear as well, more info I suppose, is maybe not as clear as out of stock, but it actually still, it still keeps my journey going. More info, they can’t explain in detail on the product listing page, so I kind of do need to click on it to go onwards to another page to have the opportunity to learn more about why I can’t buy it

Per Axbom
Exactly, and out of stock really doesn’t help you either. It’s just, again, informing, it’s not helping you get to the next step.

James Royal-Lawson
You’re right. Yes, it’s a service. It’s very similar to the services and available things like out of stock doesn’t let me know when it’s expected back, and usually on their pages, it will actually say, on the way from our supplier, for example, or expected in three weeks. They do actually give you a little bit more information about when they’re expecting it back in stock. So, yeah, I literally do get more info when I get to the product page, and I can still then create a watch for when it does actually come back in stock.

Per Axbom
That sounds like a great example. For me this also, this all relates to friction as well. If you add more friction, you’re actually helping people. You’re putting up sort of a barrier to entry. But the friction itself could be that you need to enter more information about yourself or or enter stuff that helps you understand what the service is for, which means that you can more, more soothish, at least understand that, oh, now I understand this service is perhaps not for me, because one thing that I certainly do is I sign up for a lot of different services, and all I have to do is just enter my email and a password and I have an account. If during the account creation process, I was actually helped to understand better what the service is about. I probably wouldn’t have created as many accounts.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah. But so at the end, there is a few key takeaways. One of them is failing early, means informing customers as soon as possible when you cannot meet their needs, which helps avoid frustration or wasted time. Second takeaway, identify potential failure scenarios and find ways to surface them to the user as early as possible. I really like that one, because that kind of involves, like, you know, you digging in your own organization or your own product to kind of, you know, stress testing it a little bit, where can we find places can fail and how far it can fail down the chain. Third takeaway, clearly communicate why the product, service or function is unavailable.

Now I’m going to add to that one and connect to what we’ve just talked about a fair bit is that not only clearly communicate why the product, service or functions unavailable, but offer a suitable solution or way forward. So we avoid some of these temporary unavailable, out of stock and so on, sold out because they’re dead ends, and they might be informed dead ends, but they’re still dead ends, and it would be nice to, to avoid some of those, if we can, without being overly pushy.

James Royal-Lawson
Those are certainly really good articles. I actually learned a lot by discussing them, I think, and I hope our users, our users, our listeners, did as well.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and I think that’s such a more of a meta reflection Per. It actually is really useful, even taking simple articles, it’s really actually quite useful having conversations with people about them, because you can spark really interesting, interesting discussions that maybe weren’t evident when you just skim through it on your phone on the way home.

Per Axbom
Exactly

James Royal-Lawson
I’ve got some recommended listening for you related to yours, I guess, core web vitals all about measuring kind of performance of things. Back in episode 283 we interviewed Katie Hempenius from Google, talking about the core web vitals that you can obtain from your browser, giving you information about the performance of your web page.

Per Axbom
I learned a lot on that episode as well. There were lots of things I didn’t know that you could get from core web vitals.

James Royal-Lawson
Always learning, Per.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep Moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See one the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Per, What do you call a cow that’s stopped producing milk?

Per Axbom
I don’t know. James, what do you call a cow that has stopped producing milk?

James Royal-Lawson
An udder failure.