The power of understanding
Have you ever been in a café, pondering which drink is more likely to get you through the early morning Zoom call, when the helpful menu screen suddenly turns into a giant video advert?
Or maybe you’re in the McDonalds drive-thru, trying to choose which dips to get with your McNuggets when the video menu is replaced by a screen showing your order.
These dynamic video menus are relatively new examples of poor user experiences where businesses have forgotten a simple and powerful skill — understanding what it’s like to be a customer.
Designing with empathy
User experience design has many aspects, but one key element is empathy — putting yourself in their mindset, and navigating your product, your app, your service as them.
Let’s revisit those video menus from the customer’s perspective. What are some potential negative consequences of this user experience?
Goal, Interrupted
You knew you wanted a nice hot cappuccino, but choices are never that simple in cafes. Consider some of the other choices you might need to take:
- What size do I want?
- What does that size cost?
- I’m watching my figure — how many calories are in that cup?
- What silly name have they given the medium size in this chain?
- I live dairy-free — what milk alternatives do they offer?
- I’m having a bad day — what syrups can I add?
- Maybe I want a little snack with my coffee, as a treat? (it’s been a really bad day)
That’s a lot of options — but humans are generally great about scanning a fixed menu and making a decision while queuing.
But now, with an ever-changing video menu, we’ve introduced a hurdle. The customer’s goal — a nice supply of caffeine — is interrupted.
The information they need flashes by and disappears, only returning 10 or 20 seconds later when they’re already at the counter.
How would you feel now — Frustrated? Annoyed? Annoyed enough to walk out and go elsewhere?
Broken trust
One of the strengths of that classic, unchanging café menu is that it’s learnable. Customers learn where to look, where the prices are, and eventually they might graduate to having “the usual, please”.
There’s a subtle but powerful benefit to a customer becoming familiar with a space. A dancing video menu might just replace that comfort with uncertainty — the customer doesn’t know where to look or what to expect. They can’t trust the menu.
And if they can’t trust the menu, will they build trust with the brand?
Out of control
Cafes are mostly lively but relaxed — warm, snug spaces offering comfort and calm. Our hypothetical customer wants to spend 20 minutes out of their work-day unwinding with a chai latte.
Now imagine that exhausted office worker walking in and being greeted not by a calm and intimate space, but with the visual noise and sensory overload of a video menu.
Would you feel rushed? Overwhelmed? Like you couldn’t make an informed choice?
The brand impact
Add up all these potential negative feelings, and you risk real damage to your brand. Frustrated customers might go elsewhere. Loyal customers might feel neglected. Potential customers may be put off by a stressful and overwhelming first experience.
And if you’re a customer who has already decided to buy coffee, are you going to feel better about that brand when it tries to upsell you while you’re standing in line?
Of course, there may be legitimate reasons for a business to use video menus despite the risks.
Interrupting customer behaviour might introduce them to new items. A streamlined menu showing only popular items might improve service efficiency. Overwhelmed customers might make more impulse purchases.
But these are big and risky “mights”. That’s why it’s crucial for brands to study consequences before making changes. And you can only do this by understanding your customers.
The path to understanding
User experience design involves various strategies to make the vague idea of “understanding your customer” more concrete and actionable.
1. Start by defining your customers
Work with a brand and UX strategist to define your key demographics, and build vivid and specific customer personas.
These personas will guide and inform every step of your user experience strategy.
2. Use personas to empathise
Take each persona and step into their mindset. This is almost like an acting exercise — think like them. Then look at your brand, your product, service, or website through their eyes.
How might they act or feel?
This exercise can reveal insights you might miss from the inside. It can also highlight negatives you’re too close to the product to see normally.
3. Balance data with sentiment
There may be clear data showing that a change improves sales, efficiency, or something critical to the business. That data is really important, but it must be balanced against something harder to measure — sentiment.
Does it matter if sales are up in the short term when the brand has been cheapened by a change? In the long-run might sales decline because the brand has lost value?
A business run on hard data alone may never be loved — and rarely succeeds.
4. Measure the unmeasurable
Sentiment may be hard to quantify, but it’s not impossible.
Work with marketing consultants to build customer satisfaction surveys or direct feedback systems.
Collaborate with designers and developers to run A/B tests for changes, and gather feedback from each test group. Compare raw performance data with customer sentiment to make informed, balanced decisions.
Understanding isn’t optional
Empathy isn’t a fluffy, frilly concept. It’s a connection with your customers that will help you understand them, and understand how to build loyalty and trust with them. Empathy and understanding drive stronger brands, smoother customer experiences, and longer-term thinking.
These video menus seem like a great example of a business valuing hard data over understanding and empathy. The numbers told them that customers who see more adverts are more likely to buy something extra, and that’s all that mattered.
But would they have built something even better if they had tried to understand their customer?
If you're struggling to understand your customer, work with me to create a brand strategy that's built on empathy and understanding.