Erik on product management and such
In a previous post I talked about the importance of brand awareness when launching products in new markets. Brand awareness reduces uncertainty. Brand trust lowers perceived risk. Positive brand attitude improves interpretation. In practice, this means an app that performs well in a familiar market can quietly underperform in a new one, even with identical UX flows. New, low-familiarity users scrutinize every detail, often interpreting small inconsistencies as signs of risk. Trusted brands get more leeway, while unknown brands start at a trust deficit.
Closely related to brand awareness is trust-breakers: things that makes the experience feel off, unlike what you as a user would expect from the type of company you would [buy a car from; buy plane tickets from; buy a smartphone from, etc]. Unlike brand awareness which is owned by marketing, UX trust-breakers are owned and can be fixed by the product development team (product manager, designer, developer).
The user journey from first brand impression to first touch, to the experience of trust-breakers and the post-interaction reflection can look something like this depending on familiarity and quality of experience:
I’m going to dedicte this essay to trust-breakers; what they are, how they impace the first-time user experience, and how fixing them can improve your metrics.
UX trust-breakers
“A websites' first impression is known to be a crucial moment for capturing the users interest. Within a fraction of time, people build a first visceral “gut feeling” that helps them to decide whether they are going to stay at this place or continue surfing to other sites. Research in this area has been mainly stimulated by a study of Lindgaard et al. (2006), where the authors were able to show that people are able to form stable attractiveness judgments of website screenshots within 50 ms.” - Google Research
Users are finicky, especially new users. Their actions are rational within their context, but you don’t know their context so you won’t understand their actions. Without familiarity you’re not part of their context so their interactions with you is based on pre-conceptions about how things should look and function. They have opinions about you too. “Why does this thing look so weird?” “What they hell were they thinking when they built this?”
Principles of global design and benchmark competitors
I’ve spent a decade building global products and brands in China at DJI, OnePlus and OPPO, and more. If you want to learn what I know, subscribe.