Mediocre UX for lots of cookies
Why cookie notices are deliberately designed to be hostile to users.
Please note: I first published this article in German. Since English is not my native language, some phrasing might be clumsy or misleading. I am very grateful for corresponding feedback!
Almost three years ago, on May 25, 2018, the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, came into force. This had only one obvious consequence: pretty much all websites in the EU area now have a more or less ugly cookie notice asking visitors to agree to the tracking of their surfing behavior, for example to continuously improve the digital offering they visit.
Dear user, I would like to look over your shoulder at neuralgic points of my website, because if I see that you and many others here are not getting along, I will make the website better for you.
Yeah. Riiiiight…!
Certainly, to a certain extent, it’s about user experience. But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s much more about targeting, retargeting, programmatic advertising, marketing automation and so on.
Viewed through rose-tinted marketing glasses, it’s all about providing users with relevant content, information, or products to maximize your own success. At best, this is a win-win situation. I find my new favorite shoe in seconds and the online retailer is happy about my purchase.
In fact, however, this is pure capitalism, and user experience in this context is more of a dirty word. Funnel optimization is not about giving the user the best possible shopping experience. It’s about maximizing the likelihood of a purchase. At best, that’s fun for the user, too. But we should stop calling it user experience.
What’s user experience again?
The user experience (UX or UE) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person’s perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. Improving user experience is important to most companies, designers, and creators when creating and refining products because negative user experience can diminish the use of the product and, therefore, any desired positive impacts; conversely, designing toward profitability often conflicts with ethical user experience objectives and even causes harm. User experience is subjective. However, the attributes that make up the user experience are objective.
Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Experience
I first wrote this article in German. In the German Wiki, a DIN standard is referenced here; interestingly, the English explanation explicitly preempts me here.
But, dear marketing friends, now let’s all pull up a chair, sit in that circle of trust, look deep into each other’s eyes, and consider whether we really want to improve the user experience when it comes to UX optimizations.
I think UX is dead.
We say UX and mean CP — Closure Probability. The probability of closure. We want to optimize that. The fact that the user might have more fun along the way is perhaps the vehicle. But not our goal. We don’t want to lead the user to his goal, but to ours.
And I can prove it by looking at your cookie notices.
A random selection of automotive manufacturer websites in Germany reveals a very clear trend.
Audi chooses easy-to-understand language for the cookie banner and allows visitors to configure cookies individually.
However, from a UX perspective, one thing stands out immediately: Button colors and labels. We often talk about guided navigation and primary and secondary CTAs. You can see this nicely in the background of the screenshot: The primary, more conspicuous CTA is first in the reading direction from left to right and invites you to “Learn more”, the secondary, transparent and thus more discreet CTA offers “Configure now”. This is logical: Audi first wants to get visitors excited about the vehicle; if this is already the case, they voluntarily take a step deeper down the rabbit hole or purchase funnel and configure the desired car.
In the same way, in the Cookie Banner you work with primary and secondary CTAs.
The primary CTA with the stronger color and set first also makes it linguistically quite simple: “Accept all”, everything is already done and the Audis can be discovered. The secondary CTA, more difficult to recognize as a button, says “Save settings”. Wait a minute, which settings?
This looks like work.
Hey, I don’t want to work here, I want to discover cars!
If you scroll down the list of cookies, there is no further button. With some thought, it becomes clear that “Save settings” without activating another cookie apparently means the following: “Do not allow cookies, except the essential ones”.
A very obvious exploitation of known and learned UX mechanisms to get users to choose the most convenient path for them, the most insightful for Audi, and click “Accept All”.
To Audi’s advantage. Neutral at best for visitors.
But actually, the user is taken advantage of here with UX methods. Come on, give it to me, let me track you, you want it too…
Or to put it harshly: The user experience with the cookie banner is deliberately bad so that the user agrees enervated.
Those who now want to stampede with pitchforks to Ingolstadt, to Audi’s headquarters, may first make themselves a fennel tea to calm down: That’s what most websites do.
The good news is that not everyone is like that.
Of course, the experiment can be continued endlessly and applied to any industry. Take a closer look at the cookie instructions!
The German magazine W&V recently ran the headline, “Cookie notices annoy online shoppers,” but did not address the real problem. Cookie notices are annoying because the experience is always frustrating for privacy-sensitive users. Either one chooses the quick way of unrestricted consent, or one has to read very carefully where and how one has to click.
Dear colleagues, how can we build such UX nightmares and then still write in these boxes and banners that tracking is for optimizing the user experience?
And how do we get out of this mess? Maybe with external constraints. NOYB, an activist group, recently crawled various websites and automatically evaluated what I have shown here with a few screenshots. According to them, these are namely violations of the GDPR. NOYB is now asking these website operators to rectify this situation and will then take legal action against those who refuse to do so.
And I’m sure there are still some marketers out there who use UX not just as a means to an end, not just to optimize the probability of closing a deal, but to actually provide positive experiences for their users.
We need to advise more and better. Not only for cookie notices.
If we are committed to user-friendliness, we must also implement it. Even if it hurts, because users have different interests than we do. But the cookie notice is our digital store door. Do we want our visitors to get in a bad mood at the door?
