Each definition has merit, but perhaps each has too narrow a focus when considering that a

customer experience can cross services, products, and contexts. Convenience in the user
experience must take into account the costs of the experience (in money, effort, and other
terms), a true understanding of the stages of the experience, and an understanding of
customers as their needs and behaviours change from context to context. This is no simple
task, but the effort is worthwhile.

Why Is Convenience Important?

In September 1999, Amazon.com set off a firestorm when they patented one-click buying6.
An Australia telco has waged an eight-year battle against the patent and millions of dollars
have been spent on this legal dispute around the world. Is one-click purchasing worth
millions of dollars? Apparently, yes.

A 2002 study found that something known as convenience orientation—a customer's

general preference for convenient goods and services—has a major impact on buying
decisions7. The study also found that the perception of a service's convenience affects the
overall evaluation of the service. A separate study in 2007 also found that convenience
was the most relevant factor in the use of mobile devices for Internet shopping8. Millions
of dollars are being spent on the one-click patent dispute because convenience has a major
impact on a customer’s decision to engage with a service and can indeed reduce the cost to
serve.

Convenience determines usage

The most popular camera used for Flickr photo uploads isn’t actually a traditional camera,
it's a phone. On a random day this year, 65,000 media items were uploaded to Flickr by
over 5,000 iPhone 4 users alone9. This is clearly not because the iPhone takes superior
quality pictures. The smartphone’s ubiquity, connection with online services, and relatively
simple camera functionality make it a low-hassle choice for the experience of photo sharing.
For Flickr, that equates to more content and more users, which in turn brings extra revenue.
The convenience of uploading via the iPhone 4 is boosting Flickr’s bottom line.
Convenience reduces your costs to
serve
We have known for a while that self-service applications create higher levels of perceived
and actual convenience for the user. One of the first signs of this was around 1970s when
the ATM was introduced. Over time, people began to choose the ATM over a more personal
service at the branch. More recently, airlines have been saving money in staff costs by
using allowing boarding passes to be printed at home or at the automated kiosks at the
airport. The effort of inputting data and printing the boarding documents is moving from the
ticket agent onto the customer, but the perceived convenience of being in control of the
experience and the very real convenience of avoiding the dreaded check-in line outweigh
the extra work put on the user. It may be counterintuitive, but in some
contexts, convenience means more work for the user, which can translate to reduced
service cost for the company.

How to Achieve Convenience

There is no magic button and no checklist to make a service absolutely convenient. While
the overall cost to users of time and effort can be monitored and managed, the perception
of convenience is specific to each person. The best way to understand and implement
services that are perceived as convenient to your customers is to research and
design based on their needs.Once you have an understanding of your customer's journey
in buying or using your product or service, there are four key convenience strategies that
are worth understanding and supporting.

Actual convenience
Actual convenience has to do with time and effort. Reduction of physical effort for
undesirable tasks can come in a variety of forms, such as frozen meals that eliminate the
need to cook, or online shopping that removes the need to travel. Modern technology has
provided a variety of tools for bringing goods and services closer to the customer. Banking
was once consigned just to the branch, but the spread of ATMs and then of web and mobile
banking has moved the service to the customer. Now walking a block to find an ATM has
become inconvenient. Businesses that remove the need for customers to make their own
way to the service, such as free shuttles from hotels and airports, or that bring the service to
them, such as mobile apps that expedite airport check-in, build physical convenience.
Flow
The second strategy to consider when implementing a convenient service is flow. Everyone
has been on a highway when the gas light starts blinking. You pull into a rest stop to fill up
the car, grab a bite to eat, use the toilet, and maybe make a few phone calls. The petrol was
the only critical motivator for the stop, but the aggregation of services supports multiple
secondary needs while still fulfilling the first. Think back to the list above of all of the things
you can do or buy at a 7-11. Few people stop at a convenience store for an ATM, but many
find it useful in that place at that time. From childcare at the mall to USB charging stations at
the airport, successful design for flow means that you need to understand your customer's
behaviours, habits, and rituals. Let me give you some examples.

While doing design research, I am regularly surprised by how many people get their news
and updates during the process of checking their email. People who use Yahoo!, Hotmail,
or BigPond email addresses regularly go through those portals to check their email. On the
way through, they casually browse the headlines, check the weather, and look at the TV
guide. Like every modern, email-obsessed individual, they check email frequently, and in
the flow of that primary task they have the ability to complete several secondary tasks.
Getting those people to visit another news site outside of their normal patterns where they
can't fulfil as many needs simultaneously requires strong, sustained, and obvious incentive.

Here at Different, we have had to learn the same lesson. We have a weekly updated
printout on the wall that serves as a project dashboard, looking at the various components
and status levels of ongoing projects. It has moved around the office a bit from wall to wall,
trying to find a home where everyone in the office will see it and be kept up-to-date. It now
lives on the wall above the printer. Aside from the bathroom stall door, that is the wall we
stare at the most while we mill around waiting for deliverables to print, and looking for a
distraction.

Flow is the "would you like fries with that?" approach. When you understand the habits and
patterns of your customers and their primary goals, it becomes easier to cross-sell and up-
sell supplements to their experience at the right place and the right time.

Perception
Stanford's Dr. BJ Fogg argues that simplicity of a service can sometimes be objectively
measured, similar to actual convenience; however, the perception of a service's simplicity
can vary widely based on the individual and context in question. For example, if one
customer expects a service will be complex and the other has moderate expectations, it is
more likely the one with the higher expectation of complexity will perceive the service as
simple or convenient. In the United States, politicians have jumped on this notion, setting
expectations before debates to highlight their strengths or downplay their weaknesses. John
Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, has a set of ten laws of simplicity
that provide interesting insight into this strategy. His fifth law talks about differences
between expectation and reality:

Without the counterpoint of complexity, we could not recognize simplicity when we

see it. Our eyes and senses thrive, and sometimes recoil, whenever we experience
differences. Acknowledging contrast helps to identify qualities that we desire—which
are often subject to change.10

If there’s a perception of inconvenience around your industry, your service can be

differentiated based on its relative convenience.

If periods of waiting are a reality of the service you provide, the two tools that you have in
your arsenal to maintain a perception of convenience are communication and distraction.
Being given a number at the deli counter or being told the wait time when calling customer
service sets expectations and reduces the stress of uncertainty. Based on the
communicated information, customers are able to make more informed decisions and have
expectations of effort. Simple things like a magazine at the doctor's office or free bread
while you wait for your main course at a restaurant distract from sitting idly.
Distracting people from long wait times is a major concern for Disney. They have spent
millions of dollars in their theme parks determining how to keep families happy and eager
while waiting in massive queues. It's no accident that there are TVs every 10 meters and
signs saying "you are X minutes away."

Waiting and, particularly, thinking about waiting cause dissatisfaction. By giving customers
clear expectations of temporal effort and by filling their inactive time, you decrease the
perception of inconvenience.

Control
The last strategy for achieving convenience is to provide customers with control and greater
engagement with their experience of the service. In some instances, by providing customers
with the tools to control and more deeply engage in their experience, you may be creating a
perception of improved convenience when, in fact, you have decreased actual convenience
by increasing the customer’s workload.

A good example of this is vacation planning. Online planning tools bypass the travel agent
and thus require more time and thought from the customer, but the customer’s sense of
being in control and of more actively making choices from a variety of options engenders a
perception of greater convenience. Technology such as ATMs, airport kiosks, and self-
service supermarket checkouts remove the human aspect from the service and give
customers the perception of having control of the experience, despite the fact that they are
being guided through a very specific process flow. In this way, providing control to the
customer can improve customer satisfaction and reduce the business’ service costs.

When Convenience May Not Matter

The best way to understand and implement services that are perceived as convenient by
your customers is to research and design based on their needs; however, there are times
when the most convenient service is not the best alternative for meeting a customer's
needs. Let me give you an example.

A colleague once told me about a project that tried to move a phone or branch based
signup service to the web. The client sold financial products to retirees that traditionally
required financial advisers. Even though an online signup seemed like an obvious way to
make the product more accessible and convenient, contextual inquiries showed that this, on
its own, was a poor incentive for the target market. The benefit of outside-business-hours
access offered by an online signup was less important for retirees, who are frequently
available during business hours, and whose apprehension about new technology leads
them to value communication with “real people.” For these retirees the prospect of an
online-only service was decidedly inconvenient.
 Another good example comes from a project I led looking at how owners of small
businesses in rural industries (e.g. farms, dairies, orchards, etc) keep up-to-date and learn
about the growth of their industry. Though there are plenty of resources from industry
publications and academic journals to blogs and Twitter feeds, the biggest issue in choosing
a resource was trust. The people I spoke with preferred travelling, sometimes great
distances, to live events like conventions and farm days to proverbially kick-the-tires and
speak with real people which they could verify and interact with, instead of just reading
about distant innovation in the comfort of their homes.

For experiences where quality of service is critical or where service cannot be obtained
elsewhere, convenience is less of an issue. In the case of medical care, many people are
willing to fly across the country to speak with a top neurosurgeon and avoid the more
conveniently located Dr. Nick. Convenience becomes a critical factor in saturated
industries where the services are often too similar to distinguish. In these cases,
convenience can be your major differentiator and a key customer decision-making attribute.

Conclusion for the UX Practitioner

One of the risks we face in designing a convenient service or interface is that we focus on
the symptoms instead of the disease. Achieving convenience lies not just in reducing the
barriers to the service, but in raising its inherent value. Ultimately, our goal is to create
something that is not just sufficient, but excellent; not just easy, but desirable; not just
successful, but delightful. We must reduce the barriers to the service without undermining
the inherent value of the service itself. While 7-11 continues to max out the boundaries of
convenience, it is now just another Kwik-E-Mart looking to demonstrate its value in a
competitive market. How would we make the doyen of convenience more convenient?

To achieve convenience, we must deliver some or all of:

 actual convenience, the physical and cognitive barriers that make using a product or
service difficult
 flow, where related services are placed in the context of others
 perception, where we play with expectations to enhance how customers perceive a
product or service
 control, giving customers the ability to manage their own experiences

The devil of achieving convenience, as always, is in the detail. Research techniques based
in customer experience principles are a key to meeting this critical challenge, but once that
challenge is addressed, how do you move to a point where enjoyment and desire to engage
is a stronger draw than convenience? How do you make a site personal, and give it
personality? Those answers are coming soon in the next of our 7 Essentials series.

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6. Peri Hartman et al. Google Patents - Method and system for placing a purchase order via a
communications network. Accessed on July 22, 2011. [back ^]
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Illustrations by: Nam Nguyen