I’ve recently picked up my plants, clothes and books in order to movie into a new place. That also included the amusing process of going through reference checks with the agency in order to get a tenancy agreement. It is basically a way to prove you’re an employed and responsible tenant who will not at some point uproot from the country without leaving any traces behind.

This particular time I needed to fill in an online form with all of my details.
It sounded simple enough.

But, of course, it wasn’t, or otherwise there would be no story tell.

I navigated from having to scan a QR code on my laptop with my phone, only to be redirected into completing the whole form on my phone. That was exactly what I wanted to avoid, considering the ridiculous amount of copying and pasting data I needed to make.

Once that got done and the photo of my passport with a younger version of my face and an odd fringe got sent, I was thrown onto the second step.

But then I couldn’t go back.

There was no way to check if the passport photo got sent or not. Did it get uploaded successfully? Is it good enough of a photo to be accepted for a reference check? How can I take another look at it and be sure it actually went through?

The rest of the form didn’t bring me any more joy. The passport issue was a prelude to weird fields, processes that don’t make any sense from a usability perspective and, most importantly - no way of going back

We go through life without the magic ‘’back’’ button. 

We make decisions based on gut feeling, past experiences or weighting the pros and cons.

If we make a mistake, there is no way of going back and undoing our actions. We can’t reverse what we’d done, only learn from it - hoping to make a better decision next time around.

In design, however, we are used to the beloved option of going back: to check again, to change, to make sure we’d done it right. 

It seems as if the ‘’Back’’ button is a version of a life we would like to be able to live. One where we can make ourselves stop talking before saying a hurtful comment to a friend or the one that would make us think twice before doing something we would later consider to be stupid.

The undo button serves a similar purpose. It is one of those functions that we got so used to using that we can’t imagine using the majority of software without it. How great would it be to have the ability to undo a job interview that didn’t go well? Or a bad haircut, an unnecessary quarrel or something more serious, like crossing the road without taking a good look on both sides?

Life’s utter unpredictability and hurdles along the way makes us want to create friendly user experiences. If life is full of unease and difficulties, then can we try making an understandable and predictable user journey when using an app or viewing a website.

We can gently guide our users to find what they need quickly and without too much thinking. We can serve them information in a way that is familiar and easy to understand. We can do our best to give them exactly what they want.

Bad user experience is time-consuming and frustrating, especially if it is regarding something important. And in the majority of cases, the important things are the ones with horrendous UX. Booking a GP appointment, changing the address for council tax, doing your tax return or, as in this case, securing a place to live.

That’s why, for different reasons ranging from budgeting to inertia, the support systems we rely on the most become hardly usable. Fixing their UX might not be seen as a high level priority because, despite their many flaws, they have been able to work like this for years. 

But fixing the user experience and allowing a wide range of users to access these support systems when they need them the most would cut down:

• Time spent emailing and calling by users

• Time from staff spent answering emails and calls

• Going back-and-forth between departments or different staff within the same institution or organisation (like GP admin staff informing the pharmacist to give a call to a patient after the patient had spent time unsuccessfully calling their GP multiple times)

• Both user and staff frustration

• Overall cost spent doing correspondence and admin work

It is 2021 and we have such great technology that we fly rovers to Mars. Then why do we still have messy, ineffective systems here on Earth, when they could be made much more accessible?