Are you causing unintended friction in your services ?
We get asked to do behavioral audits of services and products very frequently, and while we have our own way of doing these, I think that this Sludge guide by NSW Government is quite useful.
If you haven't heard of Sludge, it is a term to describe friction that is caused (intentionally or unintentionally), and which stops people from making progress in an experience.
Friction is everywhere in design, and it is something that you should be scanning for on a regular basis - in fact, it should be one of the routines your team adopts, so you can work on removing it. (unless of course you want the friction, but that is a different conversation)
What might some example of sludge be?
-Think about all those subscription services, designers make it very easy to subscribe, but then very hard to unsubscribe (that intentional friction is sludge)
-Hard to understand language and jargon that confuses your customers or even your employees.
Here are some things you can ask yourself when doing an audit:
On
Purpose and Call to Action: -Do you understand your audience and your purpose? -Is there a clear ‘call-to-action’? -Is the purpose clear?
On Design and Structure -Is the structure easy to navigate? -Does the most important information stand out? -Have you given the customer choice?
On Language and Content -Is the language personalized? - Is the language easy to understand? - Is the content limited to the key message? - Have you highlighted what others are doing? - Have you used an influential messenger?
On Prompting Action -Are there clear directions on how to take the next steps? -Are there planning prompts or checklists? -Are there default options? -Is it clear how much progress customers have made? -Is any additional support provided to support customer follow-through?
Of course there are many more things you can include, and you need to create your own audit, contextualized to your experience, but I am hoping this will inspire a new routine in your teams, and it helps you, just like we help our customers.
Now, some of you may say that these elements seem like common sense, but you would be surprised how many times things get missed in the rush to push things out the door, so don't skip it.
If that still doesn't convince you... here are a few other benefits:
-Helps you identify hidden process frictions -Help you quantify the impact of process frictions on customers (time, cost, customer experience, and inclusion) -Help you provide standardized criteria to evaluate processes -Helps you enable the design of solutions based on behavioral insights -Helps you improve trust in public services -Helps you reduce access inequities to services
How do you evaluate and design for removing unintended friction?