You have this great idea behind a website or app. Perhaps it’s the launch of something new or it’s an update to an already existing site or app. You’ve (hopefully) analysed what you want to include in terms of functionality and why. Both from the user’s and the business’ point of view.
Whether you’re launching or adding to something already existing you’ve probably prioritised your wishlist of requirements. Most likely de-scoped some based on budget and timings and made a desision to include some. Hopefully, you’ve done this on the right grounds by identifying, based on the user needs/tasks they will be carrying out, how important the functionality is for the user and their experience and by asking yourself the questions…
a) if the functionality, as you propose it/are able to implement it, adds value to the user and meets their actual need
and…
b) if it adds value to the business and if so, if it outweighs the cost of implementing it
Hopefully that’s what you’ve done. If you haven’t you may end up with something like this:
and a response from users that goes a little like this:
Why bother if this is all you are going to tell me!
– Paul Boag
Pretty useless and frankly quite mean. You give the user the impression, and more importantly, the expectation that they can track their items. Sure, in a way they can. But, the way this is implemented it doesn’t add any value to the user. The need and wish behind using a track and trace functionality is being able to locate where your item is. Not just knowing that it has been shipped. The user expects that to be happening within the time period that you specify. What they are interested in when tracking is specifically where it is, right now, and what that means for their expected delivery time/day.
Conclusion
Investing money in services and tools that provide users with real value is great. It will do wonders in terms of word of mouth and for loyalty. Investing money in services and tools which to the user communicates that you will provide them with real value when in fact you provide them with very little, if any at all, that’s deceiving and will piss users off. And they will tell other people about it.
Other than actually being a waste of money in terms of design and development costs, this type of functionality as implemented above has got a deeper issue. It will cause you to loose customers in the long run because annoyances matter.
Quite simply, value adding functionality is about providing users with real value which will also benefit your business. It’s worth spending that extra bit of time ensuring that’s the case before you go ahead and impement something.
