Lessons about user value and usability from Settlers of Catan and Arc Browser

In this post, I use my experience of playing Settlers of Catan online during lockdown and onboarding to Arc Browser to illustrate why solving problems for a user is critical if you want them to switch to using your product, and why user value often comes before usability.

Product #1: Settlers of Catan (online version)

Settlers of Catan is the greatest board game of all time. I love how easy it is for people to gang up on someone who is getting too big for their boots, and that, right up until the end, it’s so hard to predict who is going to win. I have more than one friendship group where regular games of Catan are one of our main ways of keeping in contact.

With the pandemic hitting in 2020 and ever more of my friends living further away, we took to playing Catan online. However, the Settlers of Catan app was rough around the edges to say the least. One amusing example: to start the game you had to click a button that says “I am not ready”. When you click it, the button text changes to “I am ready”. This confused all of us at first, but has since turned into a bit of a running joke. We now begin games by announcing “I am not ready”.

Trade was also a constant source of confusion. It was hard to see from the user interface which way round trades were meant to work. Less funny was the constant server instability, or the inability to undo accidental clicks (I once accidentally threw a game by clicking the road button instead of the ship button). Despite all of these issues, we kept on playing the game.

Product #2: Arc Browser

For Mac users, Arc Browser has become an increasingly popular alternative to Chrome and Safari. Arc are building the “browser of the future”. I had heard great things about it from Lenny’s Podcast and from some of the data scientists at work. For quite some time I had been looking forward to their Windows launch. As a product manager by trade, I was keen to try out this product that had got such rave reviews.

However, when the day finally arrived, I felt pretty underwhelmed. I realised that switching from Chrome to Arc Browser was going to take many hours of effort, and I was not sure it was worth it. I have been using Chrome for years, and I have a good system set up making use of work and personal profiles, extensions, keyboard shortcuts and bookmarks. I also like how it is synchronised across all of my desktop and mobile devices. Chrome was not a product I actually had a problem with. And I might be wrong, but from what I saw from that first hour or two, Arc Browser was not sufficiently better than Chrome to make this switch worth the effort.

Three lessons from these examples

1. User value usually trumps usability

Two of the most important risks product teams need to overcome in product development are user value and usability. User value is the risk that users won’t get any value from the solution. Usability is the risk that they will not be able to use the solution to achieve their goal.

Arc Browser has excellent usability and onboarding, and some of my colleagues are big fans. But whilst everyone appreciates a good UX, it just was not valuable enough for me to make the switch. Settlers of Catan on the other hand was difficult to use. But we all wanted to play the game so much that we all pushed through the usability and technical issues and played in any case.

A lot of users will put up with a crap user interface if the product is valuable enough to them, but few will use a beautiful product that does not help them solve a problem. Check out Marty Cagan’s Focus on Value post for more on this.

2. Solve a problem for the target user

In Lenny’s Podcast with Bob Moesta – the co-creator of the Jobs to be Done framework, Bob articulates the four forces that influence whether users switch products or not.

Here’s what the math looks like:

• F1. Push of the situation. Problem with the current solution
• F2. Pull of the new idea. Benefits of a new solution
• F3. Anxiety of new solution. Worries about switching
• F4. Allegiance to current behaviour. Inertia. Existing habits and switching costs

(F1 + F2) < (F3 + F4) = No switch. What I’m currently doing works well enough. My cash is staying mine.

(F1 + F2) > (F3 + F4) = Switch! I’m onto something new. Please take my money!

In my Arc Browser example, I had no problem with my current solution. So there was very little pushing me to switch. I also had a long history of using Chrome and was happy with my setup. In my Catan example, Lockdown was a pretty huge obstacle that prevented us from playing Settlers of Catan in person, so there was no current solution to compete with. The push of lockdown left us with little choice but to try the online game.

Solving problems for a user is important, as many users will not even contemplate trying a new product unless they experience real pain with the status quo.

3. People don’t like change

There is no shortage of multiplayer video games online. So in the Settlers of Catan example, why did we continue playing an unreliable buggy game for years rather than just play a different game?

In Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote about how people start hating change once they hit the age of 35. As a group of time-poor 35 year-olds, the idea of change was so repulsive to us that we carried on playing a game that didn’t work properly.

Jokes aside, this point is represented by F3 and F4 above.

Many users feel anxious about the unknown. Better the devil you know, right?

Existing habits are hard to break. That’s why marketers like to target us at times of great change in our lives such as moving house and going to university, as these are points in time when our habits are changing in any case. It is a window of opportunity where we are more willing than usual to try new things.

Switching costs are also particularly high for groups where there is a collective action problem. It is one thing to switch browsers when that is a decision which only affects you. The switching costs for coordinating 6 friends to all switch to a new game are much higher.