Users have crazy ways of finding workarounds.

If you ever have the opportunity to observe users interacting with your app without them knowing, take it. You'll be surprised to see that an app can be used in such unexpected ways! Really. Well, I haven't had that privilege yet, but you can get pretty close to that if you collect analytics or look at the data.

Let me share an incident that will change your perspective on UX:

We built a feature a long time ago and recently discovered that it was being used incorrectly.

Imagine an app that digitalizes the record-keeping of patients. Every day, a nurse has to go into each patient's room to check their health conditions and record them into what we'll call a 'Log'. The nurse would open a form in the app, write down the logs for each patient as she moves from one room to another, and then submit it at the end:

The [End] tag was meant to act as a delimiter when a nurse moved from one patient to another and to separate patient-specific logs from general logs not meant for any patient. The app was supposed to segregate the 'Log' for each patient based on their name and the [End] tag, and save the entries in their respective profiles.

We had validations in place to remind the nurse to put the [End] tags in the correct places and to prevent nesting of names, such as: Rushi Patel Daniel Wang [End] [End], among other checks.

Here's an example of how nurses actually used it:

Even after watching some training videos, the purpose of the [End] tag was not clear to them, and they didn't realize they could enter multiple patients in one form. Instead, they created separate forms for each patient. Due to incorrect [End] tag placement, the log text was not being saved to the correct patient profile.

We could have done a better job designing the feature. I'm sure there were simpler ways that would have guided users through the process. But who would have known initially?

Lesson: Never assume that users will 'get' it. You have to come up with simple solutions. You never know how a feature will be interpreted by the user.

P.S.: Later, we got rid of [End] tags and removed the ability to enter general logs that nurses weren't entering anyway.

Written by,
Rushi Patel