swartsr
UX Note: Federal Student Loan Notification
User experience work often comes down to compromise. You do your best to produce nice things under timelines and budgets. This often involves tradeoffs. Spend a little more here to make the experience better. Save some here but add work for users. In these situations, Giles Colborne, in his wonderful newish book, reminds us to admit to ourselves that we're making tradeoffs. It's too easy to write off a fix, literally, with a notification.
The folks who run the federal student loan repayment program recently overhauled their account management system and made one of these tradeoffs (as seen in this notification message). To me, it was a poor calculation. They could fix the system so it withdraws money from user accounts on due dates. Instead, just tell users not to worry that their accounts will display as past-due (every month) for one day. The whole approach puts the pain (of seeing an error message, of worrying about being past-due, of having to read this long paragraph) on the user. Why? Something tells me this is one of the situations where users will notice your compromise. How couldn't they?
UX Note: Federal Student Loan Notification
User experience work often comes down to compromise. You do your best to produce nice things under timelines and budgets. This often involves tradeoffs. Spend a little more here to make the experience better. Save some here but add work for users. In these situations, Giles Colborne, in his wonderful newish book, reminds us to admit to ourselves that we're making tradeoffs. It's too easy to write off a fix, literally, with a notification.
The folks who run the federal student loan repayment program recently overhauled their account management system and made one of these tradeoffs (as seen in this notification message). To me, it was a poor calculation. They could fix the system so it withdraws money from user accounts on due dates. Instead, just tell users not to worry that their accounts will display as past-due (every month) for one day. The whole approach puts the pain (of seeing an error message, of worrying about being past-due, of having to read this long paragraph) on the user. Why? Something tells me this is one of the situations where users will notice your compromise. How couldn't they?