Читать книгу Engaged - Amy Bucher - Страница 45

There is a problem inherent in having our users’ autonomy be a priority. Designers are rarely truly agnostic as to what their users decide to do. They have a vested interest in them making a particular set of choices over others. The success of their product counts on users doing certain things, whether it’s spending their money on the product or achieving a behavioral outcome that leads a third party to spend theirs.

It’s a leap of faith to design with the users’ autonomy in mind because it means allowing for the possibility that users won’t do what designers want—what designers need—them to do. It feels scary. That’s okay.

Designing for user autonomy is playing a long game. If you get users to make the “right” choices with your product through force or trickery, you can achieve short-term outcomes. Most metrics won’t tell you in real time if you’ve lost your users’ trust. That lesson emerges down the road, when the problem may no longer be fixable. You’ll discover you have pissed-off former users who are only too happy to tell their friends to stay away. Maybe even worse, you’ll have people who tried behavior change but didn’t stick with it and are now less likely to try again.

Consider automatic subscription renewals, which rely on people’s forgetfulness and inattention to detail to make an ongoing profit. Sure, you can bury the renewal information in the fine print so that you get an ongoing payment for months, maybe even years after someone’s stopped truly using your product. But what happens when the person finally takes a close look at their credit card statement and realizes how much they’ve paid you against how much value they’ve received?

It’s not a good look.

That’s not to say these sorts of auto-renewals are universally bad. They can be incredibly convenient for products like insurance or internet plans. But the key is that users should be aware that their payment will recur and have explicitly agreed to it. If they change their minds, it should be relatively simple for them to update the renewal.

Designing for user autonomy is scary. Driving users away forever because you didn’t respect their autonomy is even scarier.