
When the sum of two actual UX improvements becomes a bigger UX problem - eitland
https://erik.itland.no/when-the-sum-of-two-actual-ux-improvements-becomes-a-huge-ux-problem
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barbegal
I think the fact that out of stock items aren't shown isn't a UX improvement.
If an item isn't in stock and you can't see that it is normally stocked then
you will probably shift your business elsewhere and not come back. But even
that wasn't the root cause of the issue here, the root cause was not making
the user aware of the following logical fallacy: "if a single part exists for
the vehicle only 1 part is shown" is not the same as "if 1 part is shown there
only exists a single part for the vehicle".

~~~
eitland
> I think the fact that out of stock items aren't shown isn't a UX
> improvement.

I see your point but I'd say it can be for certain items. A stupid example: if
I was shopping for air fresheners (I'm not;-) I'd rather not see my search
results in the webshop polluted by every discontinued version of Wunderbaum
they ever had in stock.

~~~
eps
Just order them by availability.

In stock first, out of stock second.

~~~
pure-awesome
In addition to this, mark them clearly as out-of-stock - fade out the preview
image and prepend [out of stock] to the item description.

------
BlackFly
Isn't this just an illustration of the potential pitfall of the tendency to
simplify UX to cover just the 80%?

Here, the design seems to be following the idea that an owner of the standard
edition of the car doesn't need to be made aware of the existence of a heavy
duty version of the car. But a person who owns the heavy duty version and is
not aware of it is not guided to this knowledge because the UX hides it from
them. It is difficult to say that this is what happened, maybe the author was
presented with the choice of standard edition or heavy duty edition and
genuinely selected the wrong one. Unclear from the description, but yeah, if I
have to type in the car model and there is some sub-type, that sub-type should
probably be required.

It sounds (to me) like this is a case where someone decided to hide the
essential complexity of the choice and made the choice accidentally simpler
than it actually is.

~~~
Closi
I think it's slightly different. Usually they would show parts for the
standard & heavy duty editions - but they only show parts in stock, so they
only displayed one of the options.

In reality, the same outcome would have happened if the store decided to only
stock the part for the standard.

~~~
eitland
Correct, you caught the small but important difference.

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TeMPOraL
> _I saw a notice saying that unlike many auto parts webshops they would try
> to only show me the one relevant part if they knew which part I needed._

If I saw that I'd close the tab and go to a different vendor that has a proper
search interface. I get anxiety just reading that. Perhaps it's the result of
experience, but _I don 't trust devices that hide what they're doing_. This
applies to everything from digital FM radios (I assume they don't work until I
can tune in to few stations I know at correct frequencies), to "helpful"
Windows troubleshooters (my mental model of those is that they sleep for a
random number of seconds and report they're done, because I've _never_ seen
one fix anything, or even change anything in the system).

I won't trust your inventory search until I can see a dedicated search results
page, where I can see and tweak the filters to double-check that your search
system isn't making some mistaken assumptions. Because, all too often, it is,
and I have to manually correct this to get what I need. This story is just
another evidence that you shouldn't trust technology that tries to keep you in
the dark.

(And then comes the business-related cynicism of mine: "show me the one
relevant part if they knew which part I needed" is an open door to market
segmentation; take the user to the most expensive matching part directly, and
let the cheaper ones be bought by those who know how to query for them
directly.)

~~~
phkahler
Yep. Anyone that claims to have the one true answer, or the one part you need
is full of crap. Google isnt even that good, there's no way an auto parts
store gets it that right.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Exactly. And here's the thing: I would _love_ to use a system that could tell
me which part is best for me - as long as it showed me the work. I.e. what
exact criteria led to the system determining this given part is one I'm
looking for. This is the way to build trust in the relationship with the user.

~~~
eitland
This was my mistake, as an IT person I though the license plate -> model
lookup was precise enough to account for differences like this one.

In hindsight it seems kind of related to Gell Mann Amnesia: I know things are
bad on my side of the fence but expect it to be OK in the more traditional
disciplines like mechanical engineering etc.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'd say it's safe to assume the opposite - software developed "by devs, for
devs" can get pretty ugly UX-wise, but usually is still intensively dogfooded,
so there's a pressure for it to be effective. Software developed for other
disciplines usually has couple of layers of middlemen in between the dev team
and the end-users, and some of those middlemen may not have user's best
interest at heart. Common examples:

\- B2B procurement often involves optimizing software for ticking compliance
checkboxes and satisfying the whims of the purchasing manager, at the expense
of people three levels down in corporate hierarchy who will actually be using
it.

\- E-commerce isn't optimizing for customer's ability to make the best
purchasing decision, but for site owner's ability to maximize revenue. Hence
you should never use an e-commerce store as a product recommendation or
product discovery engine.

------
ssharp
Making things simple in an elegant way is difficult. It's one of the hardest
challenges in UX. You can take a knife to things and make a lot of well-
intentioned mistakes.

There are also domain-specific challenges you need to consider and every
domain is going to have a completely different set of user needs, challenges,
etc. This is where understanding your customer and understanding the variety
of ways they shop is critical.

In this case, it's an auto parts shop. I've bought auto parts enough to know
_my_ shopping behaviors and needs:

1) I know exactly what part I want and what to see what options are available
for that part

2) I know roughly what I'm looking for but am not sure the exact part

3) I'm _always_ going to buy for a specific car. Parts for other cars are
irrelevant to me

With these considerations, this site clearly made a few mistakes:

1) It didn't get the right car make, which is a critical flaw

2) By hiding out of stock items, they eliminated the ability to discover the
product you actually need if you're only loosely aware of what you need (my #2
point above)

3) Only showing one relevant part is quite bad for auto parts. Brake pads come
in different materials and I may want to choose. Rotor quality can vary a lot.
Maybe I want painted instead of unpainted calipers.

All this boils down to a case of not considering the actual customer. Good UX
is aligning experiences with needs and behaviors and what's good UX in one
application might be terrible in another. It seems like that is what happened
here.

------
eitland
Author here: I am often extremely frustrated with certain ux decisions and
write about it but this is - in my opinion - a good example of how hard even
what looks like simple ux can be.

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smitty1e
More than once in my career I've wished for a read-only connection to the data
store and a copy of the schema.

Let me figure out my own UX, thank'ee.

Which sounds cool until said schema takes up a wall in an 8-point font.

~~~
captn3m0
The only place where I've seen this in practice is crt.sh. The postgres DB is
publicly accessible, and you can just run queries against it instead of using
the website.

[https://github.com/PaulSec/crt.sh/issues/8](https://github.com/PaulSec/crt.sh/issues/8)

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crtsh/oEDOzwr2Fuc](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crtsh/oEDOzwr2Fuc)

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WrtCdEvrydy
This is an issue I had to tackle with in the past...

We offer a toggle option for a search item and if you select multiple makes of
something you can always add makes, but when you remove enough makes that the
toggle no longer applies the user gets a scary 'Your search is no longer
valid'.

I was surprised by this menu but I ended up hunting down the answer since the
management did not want any pages showing zero results... the reason: "makes
it look like we have smaller inventory than we do"

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loopz
The treating of users as idiots is one of the big pitfalls of modern UX. The
problem is many lusers even demand it, but it's so easy to do it wrong: Like
dynamic hiding of content, which raises unexpected surprises instead of
providing a consistently learnable interface. Or failing to resist adding an
annoying popup.

~~~
hinkley
It is the biggest thing I _resent_ about Bamboo. It’s a development tool
written to all of the standards of consumer software and thus is continuously
_lying to me_ about the capabilities of the system.

If you hide all the features how do I even know they are there or what to ask
for? The normal users get sticks and rocks to try to build a CI process (or at
least an understanding of it) with.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _If you hide all the features how do I even know they are there or what to
> ask for?_

Here's a modern software development plot twist:

1\. Hide all the interesting power features.

2\. Analyze reports from the pretty invasive telemetry you put in your
software.

3\. Note the telemetry saying nobody is using interesting power features.

4\. Remove these features in the next version, like a good data-driven
company.

~~~
hinkley
I remember when I learned about greedy algorithms in college that I tsked and
promised myself that I'd try to avoid doing something so obviously dumb.

And now A/B testing is sophisticated, despite being a poster child for hill-
climbing.

------
ensiferum
Since when do you order parts based on plate number?

If you're using OEM parts rather use the VIN (or the make/model/year/variant)
to look up the manufacturer part numbers for the parts you need. This is the
only semi-fool proof way.

~~~
ssharp
There are systems to look up VIN, which gets you make/model/year/trim, by
something other than the VIN. In the U.S., the state you live in can find the
VIN by plate number. They make expose this information via third parties.
Additionally, you can even do things like look up all cars by something like
driver's license # or maybe even just name/address.

Auto insurers have been using those systems for years to simplify the quoting
process. Enter your driver's license # and magically all your cars show up to
choose from.

~~~
AdrianB1
Isn't it a privacy problem if all this data (including property listing of a
driver) is available publicly on Internet? Just asking as an European guy used
with a minimum of privacy.

~~~
true_religion
In the US, lots of things that involve licensing are publicly available even
if they aren’t available online.

For example, if you own land, your name is listed in a register along with the
purchase date and price. The floor plan for your house is also listed, as is
the condition of your utilities.

------
bregma
You should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

This is an example of where they tried to make it simpler.

It turns out making things simple is hard.

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amelius
> As someone who doesn't have much training or experience from the field this
> felt great.

Oh boy, someone without experience is messing with the brakes of their car.
What could go wrong? UX problems might turn out to be not the most important
ones here.

~~~
eitland
Relax, I'm also a farmer (kind of) and I also had help the first time I did
it, so even if I haven't done it too many times before I'm not totally
inexperienced, I just wasn't aware that 1.) my car was the heavy duty edition
2.) none of the part selectors on any webshop that I am aware of was able to
differentiate between heavy duty or not based on plate number. Plus it isn't
too hard, with my background the only hard part is knowing where to apply the
elbow grease and where to be careful ;-)

Plus I have a brother who's an actual licensed car technician and I make sure
to always be very easy to ask if he has computer problems, or - more likely
lately - is stuck with some bigger equations.

PS: Seems like you are getting downvoted, it wasn't me but based on the tone
and the assumptions you make it wasn't completely unexpected around here.

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AdrianB1
I fail to see what are the UX improvements; none of the 2 count as an
improvement, but a dumb-down features.

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sensecall
Reading these comments shows how much misconception there is about UX. It's
worrying. Good UX is so much more than dumbing things down and making things
simple.

~~~
runawaybottle
Like what else? I feel like simplifying is the imperative.

~~~
sensecall
Good UX relies on understanding user needs.

Meeting user needs doesn't always require simplification: adding friction and
complexity can sometimes help.

