No Hassle
We live in the Age of No Hassle.
That’s not to say that we don’t experience any hassle. We have plenty of hassle all the time.
For instance, it’s easy for me to get a refund for an audiobook I don’t like at Audible.com. But it does involve actually phoning them up. This is a hassle.
For instance, I can hear almost any piece of music ever produced and recorded. But it has to be on the streaming service I subscribe to, and I have to remember my password. This is a hassle.
For instance, I can transfer money from my bank directly to a supermarket without actually holding money in my hand. But I do have to have my phone or credit card out.
The point isn’t that the world we live in is hassle-free, but that we increasingly expect it to be.
Audible automatically refunds the first couple of audiobooks you want refunded right on their webpage without any call. Streaming services usually integrate with other music on your phone and as a matter of course remembers your log in details. That new-fangled Amazon Go store that people are telling me exists now lets me give them money without even trying! I wonder how their refunds work.
So, the Age of No Hassle is not a question of there not being any hassle at all in our lives. It’s a question of designing everything to absolutely reduce the amount of hassle as much as possible. No hassle is the ideal all our designs strive for.
How many buttons do you need to press to buy an app in an app store, a book in a digital book store or a plane ticket in a modern ticket-finding web service? Ideally just one, and when you do need to fill in more stuff, you sigh.
“Oh Lord,” your brain moans, “do I really have to tell these people my password/user id/first pet’s name? Don’t they know who I am?” And thankfully, they do, since Chrome or Safari will just fill out the fields for you and remember your passwords. No hassle.
In fact, you can also just log in with Facebook, since you’re logged in there in your other tab, anyway, right? It’s not really that important that Facebook knows what you buy and where. In the choice between no privacy and no hassle, most of us are seemingly not in doubt. No hassle.
Since we are getting used to it and comfortable with it as consumers – I mean, these are not new examples for you, right? – we should keep them at the forefront of our design and business modelling as well.
After all, in the Age of No Hassle, if your competition makes it easier to pay them for a product like yours than you do, the users will just shift over to your competitors.
No hassle.