How a bad UX design choice can affect your business: the importance of well-designed feedback messages
Details matter, especially in UX. This article explains how a bad design choice by Revolut has badly affected me as a user, and them as a business.
The Background
My experience in Sweden is (sadly) coming to an end, so yesterday I had to pay my last rent to my rental agency. In order to do so, I used Revolut, a European fintech app that allows (among other great things) to send money to any account and currency without any fee. Even though Sweden is part of the European Union, they adopt the Swedish Crown as currency, so Revolut really helped me this year to exchange and spend my euros while living abroad.
Revolut allows you to access your money, as well as to all the services of the Bank, on your phone. The app is really simple to use, with the key functionalities designed to be immediately accessible to the users (such as: add money, send money, your cards, your transactions…). Once I opened the app, I clicked on “send money” to pay my rent as usual. I filled out the form with all the information for the payment (not so many since I already had the contact saved on the app), and I clicked “continue” to review and approve it. Once I double-checked all the information, I clicked “send” to send my payment. Surprisingly, a message informed me that “something has gone wrong”, with an invite to try it later.
This event caught me a little off guard: I’ve done this operation dozens of times, without incurring any problems.
I initially thought that I filled out the form with incorrect information. I went back to the payment page, to double-check everything, but there wasn’t anything strange. This is a payment that I usually do at least once per month, so I have the account information saved in the “Contact” category on the app. When I have to send money, I basically just insert the amount, a small description, and I’m ready to go.
“Ohh there will be some tech issues…” I thought… following the invitation of the message to try the operation at another time. Some hours later I tried again, but unfortunately, the error persisted.
“We are sorry, something has gone wrong. Please, try it later”
Mmmm… weird. I decided to give up and wait until the next day. The day after, with great hope and sure that the error would have been solved, I tried again… but as in an endless loop, the error persisted.
Discouraged and a little bit worried about getting a fine due to a late payment, I decided to open a chat with Revolut’s customer service. I explained the situation to a chatbot (before), and to a very kind agent (later), attaching screenshots of what was going on with the payments. After some hours (Revolut says that live agents are pretty busy, so they invite the clients to wait some hours for the reply) I finally got an answer about why my payments to my rental agency were going wrong. Due to a technical change made by Revolut’s payment processor, to send money to a Swedish Bank account now you need also to specify the “Clearing Number” and the “Account number”, something that has been never requested before. Once added these new information to the contact information that were already saved on the app, the payment has been finally sent.
The UX Analysis
After this (bad) experience an important question arose in my mind: why didn’t the app inform me about these necessary changes to send payments to Swedish bank accounts? As a UX designer, I can distinguish at least three different ways to inform the users about this change (inviting the users that send recurring payment to Swedish bank accounts to update the account information before the transaction — for example).
But, apart from that, there is something more important that really got stuck in my head:
Why the error feedback message didn’t inform me about what was going on?
A good design practice should be to provide users with useful information about the system and the app status, as well as about the users’ tasks, and what is going on with them. This could be done with informative feedback messages, designed to provide meaningful information to the users.
Let’s now analyse the feedback message that Revolut showed me after that my payment failed:
The message says that SOMETHING has gone wrong — without saying WHAT has gone wrong. Moreover, the message invites the users to do something wrong (“try it later”): users can be stuck in this endless loop forever, trying thousands of times to make the payment, without knowing that this isn’t a temporary error but something permanent if the user doesn’t update the account information.
This is a UX fault that became a business failure. This non-well-designed feedback message negatively impacted Revolut’s business for two main reasons:
- Not giving information about the nature of the error and inviting the users to a task that was wrong (“Try it later”) → Negatively affected the customer satisfaction since users might lose time because of that, enhancing their frustration (as happened to me!);
- Forcing the users to contact the customer service → Revolut uses a chatbot system to try to help the customer service with all the requests from the clients but doesn’t take into account how a bad UX design choice can affect the customer service (as in this case).
A well-designed feedback message would have reported information about the nature of the error (for example, linking to the “help” page that the agent sent me via chat). This feedback message would have made both the users more happy and satisfied, and the customer service less busy with requests.
This example shows how important are details in UX design, and how just a small redesign of a feedback message can help Revolut to perform better as a business.
