Types of Pain Points
- Financial Pain Points: These relate to all about purchase of product and service. These issues involve the customer’s experience of paying too much for a service. Some examples include high monthly subscription costs, repeated purchases, lack of transparency in pricing policy, or sudden jumps in fees.
- Productivity Pain Points: These are issues about efficiency. Usability issues are productivity pain points since they inhibit customers from being productive. Other examples include onboarding a customer, if the service has a lengthy onboarding process the customer will be delayed to actually using the service.
- Process Pain Points: These are issues with fractured processes marred by bureaucracy, delayed responses, lack of transparency, and unavailability of feedback. Customers will abandon purchase if the actual sale process is too long and cumbersome.
- Support Pain Points: These are issues when customers can’t find support or have to deal with fractured, incomplete, and inefficient support. A Journey-level pain point such as being stalled and diverted over and over is a Process type of pain point.
Pain Points in the User Experience
Design transcends the aesthetics of vibrant screens and alluring animations. Design encompasses every interaction with a customer right from the initial discovery to the final delivery of a solution — and then continued support over the solution’s lifetime. This wider set of experiences, a customer faces, is called a Customer Journey, and the problems faced in this journey are pain points.
Pain points are not merely usability issues such as unresponsive design. Pain points include usability issues as well as other issues. Pain points can occur at three levels, as defined by Nielsen Norman Group