Humans live and work in groups. So why don't we always design products with these interactions in mind?
It is an accepted fact that humans are social animals and we tend to live and work in groups. So why do we often overlook this fact when designing digital products and experiences? It seems products are either explicitly built for the purpose of facilitating connections (i.e. social media, Slack, Teams, etc), or this part of human behavior is an afterthought in the design process.
It starts with missed opportunities in research—when doing exploratory human-centered design (HCD) research, we often seek to:
We miss opportunities to ask questions about:
As a result, we get experiences full of friction. A few examples follow.
My spouse and I recently upgraded our car to an electric vehicle (EV). After nerding out over all the fun new tech features, we got down to the practical business of installing the necessary apps. My husband set up his instance of EVGo—an app to find EV charging stations near you—and added our vehicle to the app. He then invited me to a “family plan”. I got an email to join the plan, as expected, but the happy path ended there.
First, I encountered a bug when trying to set a username and password that could only be resolved with a call to the helpdesk (my spouse the first user, did not have the same bug). Next, once I got into the app, the car my spouse registered for our “family plan” did not show up in my instance. I tried adding it, by which the app got confused and told me it would need to change my username to be my husband’s since he’s the owner of the vehicle.
It was clear that though the design team understood the need for a “family plan,” they did not think through the entire flow and didn’t conduct validation testing to see if it worked as intended. Knowing that families, not individuals, often own cars, this flow should have gotten a similar level of attention as the initial user setup.
In a previous role, members of Two Shoes were hired by a well-known software comparison platform to understand why their click-through rates were dropping off drastically when users came from mobile devices. We observed users navigate the site from their mobile devices in person (sometimes referred to as ethnographic research).
In these sessions, we uncovered that though one individual on a team may be responsible for identifying new software for a company, they often needed to share their research with other members of the team (CFO, CEO, etc) before making a final purchasing decision. When communicating with people with C-suite titles, these users preferred the control of a desktop computer to craft their email message and attach the appropriate supporting materials (e.g. links, PDFs, etc.) before sending. We found that they did their initial research on mobile and then dropped off to make a final decision on desktop. The software comparison platform didn’t have any pathways to facilitate this process, and a result, it lost a potential click-through once the user finished their initial research on mobile.
To finish out our project, we designed new flows in the experience to facilitate team discussions, save your progress, and ultimately give the software comparison platform credit for the final handoff to the chosen software vendor.
Members of Two Shoes were also hired in a previous role to lead a project to design a complex system to allow myriad types of healthcare organizations (ACOs, large group practices, APM vs MIPS, etc) to submit data about the quality of their care to the federal government on an annual basis. Initially, it seemed like every type of organization might have unique needs for submitting the data. We were also curious about whether only one individual was responsible for submission at each organization, or if there might be a team involved. After foundational research we uncovered that in fact:
Erik S. Connors, PhD, a cognitive system engineer with deep experience in team collaboration and human behavior, notes: "Some folks play multiple roles in smaller organizations—i.e., they 'wear multiple hats'. In those cases, we have to help them reframe what they need when assuming one role at a time and to mentally model what that interaction might be with a teammate."
After discovering these patterns, we were able to design an interface that effectively managed handoffs between these 3 roles and gave each what they needed to do their jobs well.
So on your next HCD design project, let’s make sure to design for teams, not just individuals. Connors recommends including questions like those below in your user research discussion guides:
Humans are social creatures—designing with humans at the center means designing for teams, not just individuals.
