Imagine Your Digital Experience as an Offline One to Avoid Sucking

This morning, I tweeted a pretty childish response to a TripAdvisor mobile site pop up alert.

Let me explain why.

I was on my iPhone, browsing for reviews for a business I wanted to visit. I wanted to filter the many reviews and read the best or the worst to find out what people with strong opinions felt. After all, scrolling through hundreds of reviews is time consuming.

When I clicked on the button to filter reviews, I got the above alert.

Now, I’m not stupid. I work in a business too. I understand that sometimes you want your users to do certain things. I imaging there was a meeting in which people at TripAdvisor wondered how to encourage users to download the app. I imagine someone suggested to limit functionality on the mobile site. “Surely they will want to do bla bla bla so much they will download our app,” someone said. And others nodded, or maybe they even disagreed.

Anyway, TripAdivsor launched this abomination.

Why does this experience suck? Let’s forget about mobile sites for a moment and simplify things down to their basic building blocks.

TripAdvisor, as a brand, makes their customers a promise: to give them something awesome. Let’s imagine that rather than information, they sell food.

Before actually using their product, a customer has a reason to access it. And they probably have a pretty decent impression of it to go ahead and walk in.

When they do, the site showcases its features and promises some benefits as a result. The customer just has to take a pick of what they want to use. I chose to read reviews.

At this stage, Trip Advisor had no issues showing me the mixed bag of reviews. I was pretty happy about this. So happy, I wanted to see more.

Finally, I would something I *really* wanted. This is a great thing for TripAdvisor because it’s a basis for a happy, engaged customer who returns again and recommends their product to others. Heaven!

What did TripAdvisor do?

TripAdvisor sent me away.

They stopped me from doing something with their product that I found valuable and asked me to do more work, put in more effort, to access it.

They didn’t just advertise a feature to me that wasn’t available on their mobile site. They actually made it look like it was right there in front of me, only to take it away from me. Like a toy out of a child’s hands.

They also insulted me.

So, no, TripAdvisor. I will not download your mobile app. Even though I work in designing mobile apps, spend most of my online time on mobile devices, and love apps. Just because your app has been tainted with your dirty tactics.

What can we learn from this?

Why would someone approve an experience like this and spend development budget to build it? I can only imagine it’s down to the common failure to treat digital experiences with the same reverence given to physical ones. A food company would never provide a service like the one I’ve illustrated above, because it would be cruel and stupid. And yet, it seems acceptable online.

We can learn from comparing the digital experiences we design to physical analogies to uncover faulty logic we failed to notice. Are we turning people away when we shouldn’t be? Are we interrupting a user’s journey? Are we standing in the way of their success?

This is a dramatic (and let’s admit it, fun) way of putting on a set of different goggles and examining digital experiences from a different angle.

I highly recommend it. Unlike the TripAdvisor mobile site.