What is it?
When we design an IT system or process, we do so with some purpose or benefit to people in mind. It is important to consider how these people will interact with that process and a failure to do so can result in a significant cost to your business and to the customer experience. While most designers will think about the user interface, this topic goes much deeper and a consideration of how we all operate as people – of human psychology – is critical to the smooth running of processes.
Some Detail
As much as we like to think about IT systems in a cold and logical way, they don’t exist in isolation. They are built by people and ultimately, are used by and serve people. How systems and processes interact with people, especially regarding system or process failure, needs to be taken into account or the results are significant underperformance of your carefully designed IT process.
I was first introduced to the principle of taking people's motivations into account when designing IT processes over 2 decades ago at university and I’ve used this example several times since as I’ll confess it’s a favourite of mine.
Consider an ATM, a ‘hole in the wall’. We all take for granted how we use our card and pin number to get cash out but the process is actually carefully crafted to ensure the process is successful. You see the first ATM’s had a flaw in how they handled the human element…
The process for taking getting cash went a little like this:
1. Insert card
2. Enter pin number
3. Specify amount
4. Dispense cash
5. Return card to the customer
This all looks fine until you realise that many customers were walking away and leaving their cards in the machine.
It was spotted that people were going through this process with a specific motivation in mind…to get money out of their account. Once that motive was satisfied, they would turn and walk away, leaving their card in the machine. This caused significant issues both for the users and the banks – these cards were handed in or retained by the cash machine, customers would then report their cards lost or stolen at great inconvenience and the banks had to return the cards or cancel and re-issue them to customers. Consider how many customer phone calls and new cards were needing to be issued and the resulting cost to the bank.
It would be easy to dismiss this issue as the customer's own fault – they had themselves left their cards in the cash machine after all, however, one almost imperceptible change in the process would dramatically alter the outcome for the customer and minimise the incidence of this occurring.
Here's how the process looks today…
1. Insert card
2. Enter pin number
3. Specify amount
4. Return card to the customer
5. Dispense cash
The difference is a minor one – the card is now being returned to the customer before the cash is dispensed - but it is one that changes the successful outcome percentage of the process entirely.
While you might think that the customer may walk away leaving the cash in the machine rather than their card, this rarely happens as the cash is the customer's reason for being there. The change places the satisfaction of the customers objective as the very last step, after completing all the other steps required for the process to be smooth and fully successful.
One small change, altering the process to consider how it best interacts with and steers the user to the desired outcome, can lead to a major improvement.
As we start to consider controls, we will see this come up time and again -the human interaction with the process, or with the controls around the process, is critically important.
First Published 02/07/2021
All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
© Alex Cowhig 2021
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