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How Google lured me into buying Play Store Balance that I did not need and can n...

 2 years ago
source link: https://uxplanet.org/how-google-lured-me-into-buying-play-store-balance-that-i-did-not-need-and-can-not-use-10637d73a770
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How Google lured me into buying Play Store Balance that I did not need and can not use

Well, like any other day, I opened my laptop and sat down to check my emails only to be alerted by Gmail that I am out of storage space and will soon be unable to send or receive emails until I free up space or purchase additional storage.

I am sure all of you have begun seeing this now. Anyway, that is not the problem. I decided to buy additional storage. And the following screen is what I was greeted with.

I chose to go for the monthly option and went on to make the payment and that is where I was fooled.

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how-google-lured-me-into-buying-play-store-balance-that-i-did-not-need-and-can-not-use-10637d73a770

As you can see, I was presented with two options — Add a card or Redeem code. Since my card was unavailable for subscriptions, I went on to purchase a gift card worth ₹1300.

And when I was done redeeming the gift card aka adding ₹1300 to play store balance, I tried making use of the same as the payment method but guess what happened!

1*0a89_OZLhRFgpEmd66gJ6g.png?q=20
how-google-lured-me-into-buying-play-store-balance-that-i-did-not-need-and-can-not-use-10637d73a770

TADAAA! It was declined.

Perplexed, I googled my issue only to find out that Google doesn’t allow Play Store Balance to be used for subscriptions in India.

The first line in the following image is the list of things you can buy with the Play Store Balance

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how-google-lured-me-into-buying-play-store-balance-that-i-did-not-need-and-can-not-use-10637d73a770

So, why am I making a fuss out of it? I mean, some of you might think it is just ₹1300?

Because to err is human and good products must help us prevent making errors

The human language has tolerance for errors unlike the artificial devices in our life. It is so tolerant we hardly ever notice it.

The types of errors

At the risk of sounding too technical and all jargony(not a word), there are two kinds of errors: slip and mistake.

Slip: A slip happens when you have the right goal in mind but do the wrong thing by accident. One of the slips I remember from my life is having brown sugar and Bournvita enclosed in similar bottles sitting next to each other in the kitchen cabinet and when I wanted to make Bournvita milk, I just kept adding brown sugar (no points for guessing) wondering why it did not taste as it was supposed to until my mom came to my rescue

Mistake: A mistake is when the person has the goal wrong because of various factors such as, not taking all factors into account, or misclassification of a situation or it is just a plain old poor decision. And mistakes are much harder to detect because it has you thinking you are doing the right thing

So, what happened to me, is it a slip or a mistake?

You guessed right! It was definitely a mistake ..

1*W0G9io6WQ8-jIM60qsjTuQ.png?q=20
how-google-lured-me-into-buying-play-store-balance-that-i-did-not-need-and-can-not-use-10637d73a770

The information that was available to me was misleading. When I saw that I can make use of play store balance, I immediately bought it because that’s what it meant. So how can this have been prevented?

What could have Google done to prevent this error?

Well, the best way to not eat chocolates is to stop keeping chocolates in your room or vicinity. In this specific case, since the method was unavailable, it should not have been an option to me at all. Just like there was no option for any wallet, PayPal, UPI or net banking, redeem code shouldn’t have been presented as an option if Google was not going to accept the transaction.

Is this dark UX? Maybe, or it could have been a genuine mistake from Google’s end. They simply did not know this was creating an issue. But given the kind of user experience that Google provides, this was shocking. On the brighter side, this incident highlighted the importance of error prevention in UX Design.

And that is all from me. Thank you for reading

If you liked my work, you can reach out to me at [email protected] or on LinkedIn

Reference

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman


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