I’ve written previously about the effectiveness and extensibility of Expected and Actual as a mental model to understand usability. As a reminder, when the actual experience we offer users matches the expected experience they bring to the interaction, the user experiences no friction, and hence, usability is considered good.
In most cases, we accept “expected” where we find it and do our best to match it with “actual”. This is an important part of usability writings like Don Noman’s “Design of Everyday Things” and Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think”, which help us understand how users have formed their expectations and how we can map software systems to those expectations.
I recently experienced an update from LinkedIn, however, that helped me appreciate how “expected” can be influenced. On its surface, this update resembles others you may have seen - an email, perhaps, or an SMS you opted into a couple years ago, but this one struck me as just the right amount of notification in just the right place.
An important part of making this work is the channel in which this update is presented. This update displayed right in the normal LinkedIn updates feed, which made it likely I’d see it, and also made it feel less spammy than a separate notification out of the blue.
It’s also possible that I appreciated this notification more because not a week prior to this, I had a UX experience that felt very different. My experience began with an alert from my bank. Had I just authorized a payment of [x] from Amazon? I didn’t recognize the amount, and checked my Amazon account to see if this corresponded to any recent orders. It didn’t, so I answered as such to my bank, and they immediately paused my card. It was late, and I didn’t feel like finding out if my bank had extended hours support, so I decided to deal with it in the morning. Of course, I forgot about it until lunch, when I reached for my card and remembered it wasn’t going to work. A call to the bank was next, and the first thing they asked was whether I was a prime member, and might this be a renewal charge. Sure enough - that was it. Still no idea why it triggered the bank’s fraud algorithm, but the overall experience from soup to nuts felt crude and disrespectful - especially by comparison to the LinkedIn experience I saw later.
As always, the lesson here is best-applied broadly. If you have an opportunity to form expectations anywhere in your UX, you’re far more likely to be able to meet them, and met expectations are gold in UX.