When does your user’s experience end?

January 20, 2012 by Adam Parker | 6 Comments
Categories: Software, User Experience

Soluto Uninstall Dialog

As UX practitioners we spend a lot of effort into engaging users early on in their experiences with our products. Where does their experience end though? When should we stop attempting to engage them? Earlier this week I attempted to uninstall an application called Soluto and was pleasantly surprised by the experience.

Instead of the usual Windows uninstall wizard Soluto presented me with a customised dialog (shown above) giving me a choice of uninstalling or keeping the application. As I moved my mouse cursor towards the ‘Uninstall’ button the computer got sad:

Moving my cursor towards the Keep Soluto button cheered the computer up:

As well as putting a smile on my face, this got me thinking. It’s interesting that the team at Soluto decided to put some effort in here; at a stage when someone has already made the decision to uninstall the application and then gone to the trouble of reminding themselves how to do this.

I’d love to know whether this was a response to large numbers of users uninstalling. If so was it worth the effort? I wonder if it has had a significant impact on the number of users who uninstall the application. The whole application has some really nice design touches (read more about it on the Soluto blog) and they clearly think that their is value in providing a unique experience even at this late stage.

Jon Boardman

Perhaps they care so much about their product that they want to put a great experience at every step? it would be nice to think that there are companies out there that value a good experience enough to do that.

Or maybe they want to turn a negative into a positive. At this stage they know they may be losing a customer, but if they do something special that would make that person talk about the unique experience to a bunch of others, then maybe they would gain more people as a result.
http://twitter.com/userfocus David Travis

This is a wonderful example, thanks for posting it.

Curiously, when I first started to read the article I thought you were going to give this as a *bad* example because the first thing I read was the gobbledygook: “Soluto manages and nurtures your boot, preventing apps from returning themselves to the boot.”

Pardon?

They may have a clever interaction designer at Soluto but they sure need someone who can write content.
Adam Parker

@ Jon – Aha! Their ploy worked!

I really like the idea of putting some effort in to turn a negative into a positive, there must be lots of little opportunities like this.

@ David – Tech-Author, stat!
http://www.soluto.com/ Tomer Dvir

Adam,

The reason we’ve created that screen is very simple. Back in the days when the app had very little functionality exposed to users (shortening the boot), many people did not understand that why they should keep a boot-shortening product after using it once. We wanted to make sure people understand that keeping it installed have more hidden value than you would guess intuitively, and a ton more is coming soon.

It’s quite a challenge to convey a message after a decision was made, during a process that people just want to get over with.

After some thought the answer was – Let users feel exactly how the team feels when someone uninstalls Soluto, especially when he is doing that without understanding what he’s missing.
The success of the design was determined by the amount of smiles and ‘aaaaawe’s it managed to get out of the most cynical people on our team :)

In general, we do care a lot about our product and try to show that in every corner of our design and implementation. (so, no matter if the sad-face did its deed, checkout our new web version..)

Tomer
Soluto
Adam Parker

Thanks for posting and the insight into the design decisions for this screen Tomer. Good to hear from you.

I noticed that you’d got a new version of the software out, am planning to check it out. Can you tell us what has made you switch to a web-based application from desktop? . . .
Tomer Dvir, Soluto

The web version is our next step – allowing people to help and do good to other people as well (also for all your machines).
Lot’s of stuff coming out – so stay tuned.