Patching UX: A New Paradigm for Products & Services

I’ve been thinking a lot about this video recently*:

It’s only 5 minutes long. In it Clay Christensen explains how McDonalds were struggling to improve their product (a milkshake) because they didn’t understand "the job the milkshake was being hired to do". In essence, people needed something to consume on their drive to work.

I’d like to push it a little further. Clay himself is a little vague on the job the milkshake is doing, he says ‘people need something that will go ‘thunk’ into their stomachs and just sit there’. I think that the product is playing a kind of role that we see in other areas – a class of role that we have overlooked: it is patching user experience.

The drive to work is dull and frustrating, the car has a radio and air conditioning (which help patch UX) but some of the usual techniques such as using your mobile device are prohibited – so the milkshake significantly improves a poor experience. As Clay points out, other products such as donuts have unpredictable impacts on UX – they may improve it momentarily but they run the risk of leaving you with sticky fingers and sugar all over your clothing.

Elsewhere I have described the approach that my team is taking to improving Organizational Usability: making organisations significantly easier to use. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-organisational-usability-nick-shackleton-jones). In an ideal world we would be able to redesign things from scratch, creating a ‘frictionless’ employee experience. But the reality is there are often limits to our scope: poorly designed processes or systems that we simply have to deal with. In such cases we typically 'patch' UX – for example by providing point-of-need performance support to users' mobile devices.

The key insight here is this: as I look around me I see significant commercial opportunity for organisations to do a better job of patching UX – from McDonalds milkshakes, to everyday transportation. In fact, there’s a real need for ‘Professional UX patchers’ – let me give you some examples:

• In retail environments, where people have to queue to pay, why not allow customers to purchase and consume ‘queuing products’ as they queue. This is especially true of children: adults are starting to self-medicate using their smartphones – children don’t have this option.
• Design products that people can use easily to patch broken UX – for example mobile games that are quick to load, play and store progress.
• Engineer vehicles with broken UX in mind: a radio helps, as do cup-holders, but do you have the option to keep beverages hot or cold? How are snacks managed? How are passengers catered for?
• Place screens showing content popular with your customers where you expect them to have to wait (for example at passport control, bus-stops or in a post-office). Currently such screens show advertising – which does very little to improve the experience. Cartoons are especially good since they appeal to children, making it easier for parents to use their mobile devices.
• Apply gamification to broken UX. I recently observed a theme-park ride where the customers rode on circular boats, sprayed by other customers using water cannons around the circuit. It would have been much better to design the ride so that the queuing customers were the ones manning the water cannons.
• Provide free wifi or phone charging for customers whose UX is damaged by your business model (e.g. airports, trains).

Obviously, some of these sorts of things are already being done (the waiter brings my daughter colouring pens and paper as he seats us), my point is they are done in an intuitive and unsystematic way rather than being applied professionally and systematically.

*I am indebted to Dan Balzer for drawing my attention to Clay’s work.