Driver's 1-Star Review Reveals Hidden Design Flaw | Jeffrin James posted on the topic | LinkedIn

My Rapido driver gave me a 1-star rating. I was surprised, so I asked him why. Calmly, he tapped on the second star, third star, fourth star and then the fifth one! He thought he had to go through every star to get to 5-star. For him it was a long, unnecessary journey he didn’t want to spend time or effort into, after each ride. And to be frank, I didn’t think he was logically wrong here. If your mental model is sequential, of course you tap all stars till 5. My driver didn’t look confused, he seemed kinda casual about it. We assumed users can tap the fifth star and move on. But we never thought that it is a culturally learned behaviour that the stars are independent selections. Now here’s the bigger problem that this small, simple user behaviour creates. Imagine this happening thousands of times, by multiple users like him across the country and different apps. Thousands of ‘extra taps’ Multiple user-ratings skewed Trust signals are now chaotic (and false) Eventually, it leads to flawed product decisions influenced by flawed data. All because we assumed something was intuitive. “Intuitive”, I realised, is a dangerous word. What may be intuitive to some may not be intuitive to others. Makes me wonder how many of our simple designs are conveniently built on such shared conditioning. And how many invisible frictions we’ve probably accidentally normalised. #ProductThinking #MentalModels #HumanCenteredDesign | 31 comments on LinkedIn