Customer Frustration is one Consequence of Poor Usability

Lack of empathy in app design breeds user frustration. User-centric design prevents this, ensuring a smoother experience.

Chibuzor Obilom
September 11, 2024
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Briefs

I’ve always believed that empathy is not a tangible value within the borders of the Giant of Africa. We do well with sympathy – but sympathy is too late.

I also believe that empathy is the bedrock of usability.

Almost every Nigerian netizen has had a painful experience using applications built by government agencies and the civil service. These applications are usually bland and practically unhelpful to users.

In the early days we had bare HTML and CSS websites. Then came the long reign of Bootstrap. Things have gotten a lot better since the prominence of front-end engineers and product managers. The chances of applying best practices improved, and customer advocacy became a thing – officially.

I recently spent hours looking for a receipt I downloaded from an app without success. Based on my experience with this app, it looked like the person who made the app never imagined this. They never envisioned that customers would need the downloaded receipts.

The app focused on displaying a visual that the receipt had been downloaded. It left out displaying the location of the downloaded file.

I believe the implementation should not have stopped there.

In addition to displaying a visual for a successful download, there should have been a display of the downloaded file’s location. This would have helped me check the specified folder for the document.

Another thing that could have been added was an option to open the file.

Additionally, there should be an option to view the file after a successful download.

This could have saved me from experiencing customer frustration. I was in urgent need of the file for some documentation.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to EMPATHY.

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