Bad services create bad relationships with users

Ever noticed that it's the services that are the worst that find it the hardest to change? 

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s not just that the problems with the service are difficult to overcome, bad services actively create bad relationships with users that makes it much harder for our organisation to buy into change. 

This makes sense if we think about it, if all we see of our users is their failures – when they lose their passwords, can’t remember their customer number or complete tasks that we (as experts) see as ‘basic’ – it’s very easy to slip into seeing them as less capable than ourselves.

We blame their ‘ineptitude’ for their struggles to use our badly designed services, describing them as ‘less capable’, ‘more needy’, ‘more prone to error’ or ‘more demanding’ than we are. 

We’ve probably all been at the receiving end of this when using a service. Maybe you’ve asked a question that seems reasonable to you, only to be met with a sigh and an eye roll as the person you’re asking makes it clear they think you should already know the answer.

When we have this relationship with our users, our organisation can become resistant to doing user research, let alone designing services to meet those needs. We might believe that ‘the customer is always right’ when we’re the customer. When we’re the service provider, our attitude is often more a case of: ‘We can’t ask our users because they don’t know what’s good for them, or they’d ask for something we can give.’ 

As users, we have similar needs for almost every service, but ‘the hairdresser’s hair is the worst’ continues to be true when it comes to expecting our own services to have the same quality we demand from others. 

Every industry, from medicine to banking, has reasons for why they don’t trust their users. Each is slightly different, but tends to amount to something like, ‘They don’t know what they want’, ‘What they want isn’t sensible’, ‘They’ll take anything they can get’, or just straight up, ‘They can’t be trusted.’ This relationship is perpetuated through lack of knowledge, lack of understanding and, above all, a lack of empathy.

We create inferior services as a result. 

This lack of empathy can be a vicious cycle, we see our users as less capable, we don't trust them, we don't think it’s valid to listen to them or do research with them that would reveal their struggles, and so the gap between us grows.

So how do we get out of it? By breaking the cycle and consciously rebuilding  the empathy gap that has formed between ourselves and our users. 

So often we see user research as an output, not a process, but the real benefit of it (and any other kind of exposure we can get to our existing or potential service users) is that we see them as living humans with valid needs and agency, just like ourselves (or different but equally valid).

Without this, we don't stand a chance of priortising their needs.

Do you have this issue in your organisation? 

If you think you do, go check out Bad Services, our new book for lots of topics on how and why it’s vital we rebuild our relationship with users