I’ve stayed in SG for around half year. During this period, public transportation like bus and MRT have been my main ways of moving in the city.
Last week I went Bangkok for a holiday. It was the first time I visited it. I don’t know anything about Thai language. I am not familiar with the city, either. But Bangkok is a developed city. I heard that there is MRT as well. So I just bought a tourist guide and browsing info from the internet. Headed to the adventure.
Bangkok is a convenient city, like SG. The public transportation was my main way to look around the city, specifically the Skytrain (known as BTS) and subway (known as MRT). Basically, they are similar to each other just one is above ground and another is underground. Also, they are run by different companies. Even though they are interconnected at some of the stations, the passengers still need to go out of the station and return. They need to go to the connected one, which belongs to another company, buy the ticket again and head to their destination.
The first few trips I took were on MRT only, everything was pretty much the same with what I need to do in SG.
Usually the steps for buying the ticket are like:
- Identify which station I am going to
- Select the station on the map from the display
- Check how much it takes (fare)
- Insert the amount of coins or cash into the slot
- Get the ticket and collected the change returned by the machine
I expect the similar process to purchase the ticket. Until there was one trip, I needed to transfer from different lines. The first time I saw the ticket machine for BTS, which is the other line, in front of me, I couldn’t find a way to purchase my ticket.
The machine looks like this:
The first thing I’m looking for on the machine is “Where am I going to?”
The station I’m heading to, usually it is at the center of the route map on the tourist guide and internet, which I couldn’t find from the machine.
Then I was trying to recall the train map from the tourist guide book, which looks like this.
I was in line and couldn’t let the people behind me to wait too long, so I stepped out of the line, and wondering where to find the name of the station. Do they indicate the stations by numbers? Since I saw the numbers on the machine only. But the numbers looks so weird, 15, 25, 31, 37, 42 etc..
Then after a while, I found that there was a route map beside of the machine.
Then I am looking for “Where am I now?” to understand where to go next. Is it indicated by yellow background color, or red circle or something else? What does the number in the circle means? What does the tags like N1, E1, S1 and W1 indicate?
As a foreigner who is not familiar with the city, now more and more questions show up in my mind.
Then I figured out that the circle with yellow background color should be where I am now. I checked with the label in the station. And then I’m looking for my destination on the route map. My destination is one of the interchange stations. So I was looking for something looks like an interchange station. It’s not those with blue mark, not that with red mark. Where it is?
Finally I found that it is the one in the middle of the light and dark green line. It’s just different from other interchange stations.
The experience makes me think about what I’ve learned from William James, that human behaviours are like WATER. As it flows, it digs itself into a channel, that grows wider and deeper. If the flow was stopped, once it flows again, it goes along the previous channel.
People learn how to interact with the world mainly by two ways, ASSIMILATION and ACCOMMODATION.
When people encounters a new situation, they will try to associate with their experience. In that case, they assimilates the new experience by their existing models. Just like the first few trips I took in Bangkok. The process is almost the same as SG, which I can expect what I should do. Hence I have no problem at all.
But in some cases (like what I encountered in Bangkok later), they can’t fully explain the scenario by the existing models or it doesn’t work well, then they’ll encounter an unpleasant state of disequilibrium, which makes people feel frustrated. Either they need to change their model or build another new model to accommodate new experience and get rid of the state.
In a way, our accumulated experiences help us to face things we’ve not deal with before. Sometimes it works well, which means we are able to deal with the new stuff successfully. Sometimes it doesn’t work smoothly, then we need to adjust our way of thinking or make extra effort to learn new knowledge and build a new model in our head.
If the new stuff is as small as buying MRT ticket, and the person is willing to learn, it’s not really a big deal. But if the person is the target user of your new product, and you are not the only player in the market, you’d better know the models in their mind, the behaviours they act now and try to find a way to assimilate your product into their current usage, which is like following the channel their experience has dug. Cause it’s far better to adapt the product to user than to force the user adapt to the product.
Unfortunately, you don’t always represent the target user who use the product. Sometimes we need to design for someone who has different background, lifestyle and habits with us. Even though you may belong to one of the user segments, we still need to know how other groups of users may interact with the product.
And that’s the reason why we need to do user research before we introduce new product to our users. Doing the testing doesn’t guarantee to success, but decreasing the possibility of failure.
Experience is something that will always exist whether you design it or not.
The product that users interact with always deliver the experience to the users, just how good (or bad) it is. To deliver better experience, there are things we can learn from the users, like
- Without our help, how do the users deal with the problem we try to solve now? Is it the only way? If not, why they choose this option?
- Is our solution better than theirs? In what way?
- Do we make another problem by solving the problem?
You may say in the Bangkok story, once I can complete the process, then there will not be any problem for 2nd time. And the route map is quite obvious there next to the machine. Indeed once I succeed, there won’t be any problem next time. So hopefully your user can complete the flow to use your product by the 1st time instead of switching to your competitor, and those features that you’ve seen more than 200 times for the past few weeks (or months) are as obvious as the map to the users, instead of like me, asking “How do I know?” in front of the ticket machine. In that case the user has been angered even before experience your service.
So that’s why first time experience of the product is so critical! And you’d better think about it if you want the product to succeed!
Originally published at www.facebook.com.
