Pain Points in the User Experience

Design transcends the aesthetics of vibrant screens and alluring animations. Design encompasses every interaction with a customer right from the initial discovery to the final delivery of a solution — and then continued support over the solution’s lifetime. This wider set of experiences, a customer faces, is called a Customer Journey, and the problems faced in this journey are pain points.

Pain Points

Pain points are not merely usability issues such as unresponsive design. Pain points include usability issues as well as other issues. Pain points can occur at three levels, as defined by Nielsen Norman Group

Levels of Pain Points

1. Interaction Pain Points: These refer to issues and challenges faced by customers while interacting with a specific product or service. Usability issues are interaction-level acknowledgment pain points. Some examples are unclear labels and instructions on forms, no feedback or acknowledgment when a button is pressed, and delayed response times.
2. Journey Pain Points: These refer to broader issues and problems than using a specific product or service. These issues can occur at the start of the customer journey such as inconsistent branding or false marketing, in the middle of the customer journey such as long waiting times for the product or service, or after delivery such as ineffective customer support and troubleshooting.
3. Interaction-level: These are issues that are attached with the relationship between a customer and the brand. Customers have a perception of a particular brand, which is influenced by actions — or inactions — by the brand. Issues with the acknowledgment of the quality of the product or servicesto, inconsistent service, negative experiences in after-purchase support, or no transparency in policies are some of many issues that can change the relationship between the customer and the brand.

Levels of Pain Points

Pain points can be further divided into broader categories to better organize them and better manage customer experiences.

Types of Pain Points

• Financial Pain Points: These relate to all about purchase of product and service. These issues involve the customer’s experience of paying too much for a service. Some examples include high monthly subscription costs, repeated purchases, lack of transparency in pricing policy, or sudden jumps in fees.
• Productivity Pain Points: These are issues about efficiency. Usability issues are productivity pain points since they inhibit customers from being productive. Other examples include onboarding a customer, if the service has a lengthy onboarding process the customer will be delayed to actually using the service.
• Process Pain Points: These are issues with fractured processes marred by bureaucracy, delayed responses, lack of transparency, and unavailability of feedback. Customers will abandon purchase if the actual sale process is too long and cumbersome.
• Support Pain Points: These are issues when customers can’t find support or have to deal with fractured, incomplete, and inefficient support. A Journey-level pain point such as being stalled and diverted over and over is a Process type of pain point.

How to find pain points in your system?

Pain points are abundant and can arise at any stage in the customer journey. There are some techniques and practices to find these pain points before they do serious damage:

• Get customer feedback: Talk to customers often and understand their problems at various stages and points in their journey. Employ tools such as surveys to gather large quantitative data, or do personal one-on-one interviews to understand more about the problem and acquire qualitative data. Be mindful about discussing the problem instead of solutions.
• Talk to sales and support teams: Sales reps and customer support agents will be inundated with problems current or prospective customers face. Sales team will be aware of some pricing issue is making the customer hesitant to make a purchase or the support center will be aware of usability issues that are contributing majorly to calls to the support center.
• Observe users in action: A close inquiry of customers where you are observing them throughout the journey and while using the service will provide some key insight as to behavior and grievances of the customers.

Conclusion

Pain points are problems faced by customers in their journey from discovery of problem to delivery of solution. Pain points can occur at any point and at any level of the customer journey. Some techniques like customer feedback, talking with internal teams, and observing users in natural environments will help to discover pain points. Pain points can then be grouped into financial, productivity, process, or support categories to organize them and better tackle them.