You Sure About That? Accounting for User Error
- Posted June 27th, 2007
- Filed under: User Experience
I’m a big fan of Peapod.com, Stop & Shop’s online grocery store. Their website is a little unwieldy and the selection is not always great, but the nice thing about it is that once you’ve shopped there, it creates a list of items you’ve purchased in the past. Your weekly shopping can be done by simply selecting the items you need to replace from your past lists. Very convenient for a busy family.
However, my last order contained an unexpected surprise. Actually, two:
It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. To order from a past list, you need to enter a number in the quantity box next to the item. For the Boca sausage and the granola bars, I had entered “11″ instead of “1″, blasted right by the order total, and placed my order.
It’s not uncommon for users to make mistakes on forms or web applications. But how easy would it have been to program a “You sure about that?” prompt for what I imagine is a somewhat common mistake? When I added eleven boxes of granola, a message could have come up to say “It looks like you are ordering 11 of these items. Is that what you intended?” If I was going on a week-long camping trip or stocking my basement bunker, I could have selected yes and continued with my order. If not, I could have said “Oops!” and corrected the amount. A much better customer experience then getting an avalanche of unwanted products!
As an advocate for BatchBook users, part of my job is to ensure our software takes human error into account and helps to prevent or correct it. We don’t always get it right; sometimes something that made perfect sense to us trips up a customer, or we didn’t think of an issue that real-world testing has demonstrated. Getting this feedback from our users while we’re in beta is invaluable. I’m hopeful that it will result in a lot less granola in people’s virtual pantries.
You would probably be interested in an older book by 37Signals (pre-Basecamp) called “Defensive Design for the Web”). It talks about the best and worst ways to handle user interaction with your site. It covers all sorts of things from error messages to form design to “suggested data”.
They like Amazon.com in the book and use their site to demonstrate a lot of the “thumbs up” techniques. So, with all the “ex-Amazons” on your team, your husband included, I think you all will do fine.
The same thing happened to me the other day. I received 11 boxes of kashi chicken florentine. My husband didn’t know and signed the slip, unpacked the order. I noticed the next day, when I opened the freezer to find that everything in there said chicken florentine. He said he thought I just really liked it. I like a little florentine here and there, but 1 would have sufficed. I completely agree that there should have been an oops button. What if I pushed 111? Someone else just told me about receiving 24 ears of corn. That is a lot of corn.