UX professionals aim to create end-to-end customer experiences that serve the user goals as effectively as possible. To that end, we conduct user research to understand our users, their needs, and the hurdles they may encounter as they are trying to address those needs.  We usually refer to these hurdles as pain points — problems in the customer experience with a product or service. 

The phrase ‘customer experience’ is crucial in the definition of a pain point. Elsewhere we’ve defined customer experience as encompassing three levels: the interaction level, the journey level, and the relationship level. A pain point can be an issue at any of these three levels — it could be related to a particular interaction with an interface (in which case it is usually called a usability issue), to a journey as the customer is trying to accomplish a goal, or to the longitudinal experience that a customer has with a company.

Let’s first look at a few examples of pain points at the three levels:

1. Interaction-level pain point: A user is passed from support person to support person.

We’ve all been there — we call customer support, say what we need, only to be passed to another department who “will be able to handle that request.” Not only is time wasted, but we have to explain our issue over again. Even more, there are often discrepancies in the information we are told. This type of interaction causes wasted time and confusion. 

2. Journey-level pain point: A user places an order and does not receive it for months. 

I recently purchased a Peloton bike. After ordering it, I was alerted that the bike would be delivered 3 months from my order date. While this wait time was disappointing, it was somewhat expected given the high demand for the bikes during COVID-19. However, after the 3-month wait, I received a call that the bike would be delivered while I was scheduled to speak at a NN/g UX Conference. Upon calling customer support to reschedule, I was given the choice to take the assigned appointment or reschedule my delivery appointment to another 3 months from then. The pain point in this journey was the long duration between the beginning of the journey (the bike purchase) and the completion of the journey (taking my first ride on the bike). Additional point points included the lack of upfront communication about wait times, the need to call customer support to reschedule delivery, and the lack of flexibility in appointment times.

3. Relationship-level pain point: A user pays for a service but still has to watch ads. 

I pay for a subscription to Hulu to stream TV shows. However, I still have to watch advertisements periodically. This is an anomaly compared to other streaming services (Netflix and HBO Max, for example) and does not meet my user expectations or industry norms. These advertisements are a pain point in my overall relationship with Hulu — my trust in the company is diminished due to the financial commitment I’ve made, without equal reward.  Not only that, but the ads have prompted me to waste time reading forums and contacting Hulu support to solve this problem with no success.  

Pain points are diverse; they can be broad or specific, severe or relatively insignificant, and obvious or hidden. Identifying pain points is a first step to creating solutions that address users’ real needs.  

Pain Points vs. Usability Issues 

In the UX world, terminology is thrown around and inflated. This article is not meant to create yet another word for traditional usability issues, but rather define a concept that is broader than that of usability issue. In the same way in which customer experience needs to be defined as broader than usability or interaction-level user experience, pain points need to be defined as all-encompassing issues that go beyond traditional usability problems. 

Remember, pain points include usability issues (those are pain points at the interaction level), but can also include other, higher- level issues in the customer journey or in the overall relationship between customers and organizations.

The Effects of Pain Points on Users

All pain points incur a cost to users — whether it’s time and extra steps that they need to take or actual money that they lose. Some pain points translate in increased interaction cost and cognitive load. This is often the case with usability issues. For example, complicated workflows that are error-prone can result in increased interaction cost — the user will have to take additional steps to fix the error. Or, the interface may be so complicated that the user may need to call for assistance (and thus experience an increase in interaction cost).  

Other pain points will incur a time cost — for instance, if the user needs to wait for a long time for a process to complete. 

Occasionally, there is also a financial cost to the user. For example, if an internet provider has frequent outages,  users may be forced to use their cellphones as hotspots and incur extra data costs.

Last but not least, a less tangible effect of pain points on users is loss of trust and confidence. A nonsatisfactory interaction with a company often leaves users with a sense of having been betrayed; over time, these experiences erode the overall trust in the company and may cause users to terminate their relationship with the organization. 

How We Identify and Prioritize Pain Points

We can identify each type of pain point using various UX research methods, then prioritize them based on contextually appropriate criteria. 

Interaction Level 

Identify: Interaction-level pain points (i.e., usability issues), can be detected through user research such as   usability testing. Most of UX has been concerned with identifying these types of issues.

Prioritize: Traditionally, usability issues are classified according to their severity, which can be based on the issue’s impact on the user and on the popularity of the product, how often the problem occurs, and also if a user is likely to encounter it more than once.

Journey Level 

Identify:  Pain points at the journey level are found through a combination of exploratory research such as user interviews, diary and field studies and customer-journey mapping. This approach allows us to collect various data points across the entire journey and assess how successfully interactions come together to help users reach their goals.

Prioritize: Journey-level pain points often need pervasive organizational restructuring and internal process changes; they may even require a CX transformation. When prioritizing journey-level pain points, consider factors such as: 

  • The impact of the pain point across the journey: How much of the journey is negatively affected by this pain point? Is it contained to a single phase or widespread across multiple journey phases?  
  • The feasibility of solving the pain point: To what degree will your company or organization realistically be able to successfully remedy the pain point? 

Relationship Level 

Identify: Relationship-level pain points are uncovered over long periods of time. Our goal is to assess the lifetime experience that a person has with an organization and their cumulative pain points as a patron of that organization. We identify pain points at this level via benchmarking surveys (measuring brand loyalty, likelihood to recommend, and overall customer satisfaction), analytics data, or technical infrastructure that tracks and manages data of individual customers. This kind of technical infrastructure requires that customer-behavior data from across the entire journey is integrated into a single source to create a single view of the customer that includes details about individual users’ relationship with the company and their behaviors over time.

Prioritize: Relationship-level pain points are the most complex and difficult to prioritize. They require many business units collaborating to enact long-term change — internal and external to the company.  To priorize these pain points, consider:

  • The impact of the pain point across several journeys: How many of the journeys are negatively affected by this pain point? Is it contained to a single journey or widespread across multiple journeys?  
  • The churn rate caused by a pain point: How many customers abandon your company because of this pain point? 
  • The brand loyalty lost as a consequence of the pain point: Are customers likely to use your product less? Will they be less likely to recommend it to others? Will they choose a competitor in the future? 

Conclusion

Identifying and fixing pain points, and better yet, preventing them, is core to what we do as UX professionals. They give purpose to our work and help us focus our time and resources. Pain points, more than random feature requests, should be a driver for design changes. Pain points center the discussion around the customers. 

While pain points are never ideal, it is not cost-efficient to solve all of them. Tradeoffs must sometimes be made, and UX resources should be strategically applied. Once uncovering your users’ pain points and prioritizing them, explore potential solutions and plot the work into a future roadmap.