The Usability Matters blog has now moved to Madera Labs, the website of my user experience design and consulting company. I will no longer be posting on this website, and I have moved all old blog posts over to the Madera Labs website.
To get to the new blog, simply visit www.maderalabs.com/blog.
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Thanks for everyone who drops by to read. Sorry about the inconvenience of moving things.
I will be taking this blog down around the end of February, and redirecting the usabilitymatters.net URL to the Madera Labs blog at that time. Thanks!
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Posted December 21, 2009, under
strategy
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed something in conversations. When I’m trying to convince or persuade someone of a certain point, it works far better when I say “People think…” than “I think…”. The “I” pronoun, it seems, is very powerful - and can work against you.
Here’s why I think this is. Saying “I” allows those who you’re communicating with to immediately position you as a potential outlier. It’s much easier to discount what you think…harder to discount what a group of people think. See, when trying to convince someone of a point, the other party is often automatically defensive to your point. Any potential gap in your logic means an opportunity for that person to refute your point.
The problem is, using “I” often creates those gaps. At that point, it’s easy enough for the other party to simply refute you by saying “Well, you do it that way, but I do it this way”, resulting in a stalemate. The key to this is another behavior that I think is common: people doubt themselves first. By positioning them against a large, faceless crowd, it’s much harder for them to hold their side out of stubbornness.
Give it a try next time you’re working on persuading someone to your point. Use “they” or “people” or “many groups”…whatever collective pronoun you wish. Also, notice how much people use “I” in their daily conversations - you’ll see how it makes for a weak argument.
[I'm not advocating that you outright lie about what a group of people think or how a group acts. This argument is made on the assumption that you've come to your side of the argument through research and careful examination. Saying "Well, most people think the sky is brown" isn't going to work.]
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Search results pages are hard to design. When crafting these areas, understanding how a user narrows down a large field of choices is incredibly important, and isn’t always inherently obvious. As an example, a user trying to narrow down choices on a travel site may use several factors in order to weed the choices down to a manageable set: price, location, rating, amenities, etc.
Lately, as more websites offer users the ability to rate content (books, recipes, hotels, etc.), sorting and narrowing a set of search results by rating is becoming an increasingly popular method employed by users. It makes sense, as it harnesses the crowdsourcing nature of the web and allows users to cull out the products that the community has decided are good.
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While most of the usability work I do is confined to the web, it’s hard not to notice poor usability in the real world as well. In fact, many of the same concepts that drive great usability design (mapping, affordances, visibility, etc) exist both in the real and virtual worlds, serving the same purpose as far as user interfaces go.
So, I was really excited when my wife (@molliebrad) brought me the following photos she snapped at a gas pump the other day. Continue Reading ▶
Wow, I’ve let some grass grow under the blog here. Sorry about that - I’ve never been good about blogging regularly.
Recently, I spoke at BarCamp Nashville. My talk was about some usability design principles that I gleaned from Don Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things, and how I think these concepts from the physical usability world can be transferred over to the web. In the talk, I covered three main areas: affordances, visibility and feedback. There are a ton more great ideas from this book, but alas, 25 minutes isn’t a bunch of time.
If you’re interested in checking out the presentation, it’s posted on SlideShare here.
Here’s a great blog post from Will Sloan, where he takes some points I covered and expands on them (thanks Will!)
And, here’s the original presentation page on the BarCamp Nashville site.
In addition, I gave a condensed talk about affordances at Nashville Ignite, a really fun presentation event where presenters are given 5 minutes to talk, with your slide deck automatically advancing every 15 seconds. You can watch that here.
Thanks to everyone who came out, I really appreciate it!
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Numbers don’t mean anything, in isolation.
If I tell you that your website gets 3,200 hits per month, is that good or bad? How do you know? You’ve got the data - what’s the problem?
Often, data is mistaken as information - a leap in logic that results in improperly drawn conclusions and frustration with the data collection itself. However, the data’s not to blame - it’s the failure to translate that data into information that’s the culprit.
We love numbers. We want analytics on our website so we can see how many hits we get. The big letdown comes when we realize there’s no context to consider the data inside of - nothing at all to translate data into useful information. This is why strategy is so important (and so hard). Strategy and goals are what provide context around data and make it useful. Continue Reading ▶
Remember that guy at the bar, who hit on anyone that moved? Remember how you’d make fun of him after you left? ”So…frickin’…desperate”, you’d say to your friends.
Guess what? People are saying the same thing about your business.
When times are going well, your business smells great. Honest relationships with customers, selling to them because you truly want to offer them something to improve their life.
When things start to go badly, you start to stink. You start to sell things just because you need the cash. You start to think of your customers as a homogeneous group that you can drill for money. You start to have the stench of desperation.
The ironic, and damning, thing about this is that customers can smell it. You think you’re offering “deals of a lifetime”…they smell the stench.
What does this look like? Here are a few examples:
- Spamming your email list with offers and discounts
- Scraping websites for email addresses or buying lists
- Telemarketing
- Putting “Buy”, ‘Subscribe” or “Purchase” links in every conceivable corner of your website.
- Saying things like “If we can just get more subscribers, then an average of 5% will convert, and we’ll make $X.XX”
You get the idea. Look, when things go south, it’s easy to react and start resorting to these kind of measures. The problem is, your customers can smell the desparation on you. No one wants to go home with that guy at the end of the bar.
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Part of measuring success is correlating activities with results. If X happens, and we get Y result, we can make an argument as to whether or not X was a good idea. However, we have to be careful. When we mistakenly correlate the result with the wrong cause, conclusions are completely wrong.
All companies do things wrong. However, we often look at successful companies and draw the conclusion that all of their tactical moves are inherently correct. They’re doing well, so it must be because all of the things they’re doing are correct. So, we do what they’re doing. Problem: that doesn’t always work.
If you’re going to correlate cause and effect, do so in a narrow and restrained way. If you’re flailing about, trying to prove a point that you’re insecure about, it’s easy to jump to wrong conclusions.
Case in point: A marketer was hell bent on placing large, intrusive subscription ads on their website. In an effort to justify this move, they cited successful companies that are doing the same thing. The correlation they made: company X is successful, and it must be because of the ads on their website. The problem: these things might have absoutely nothing to do with each other. Without the right kind of data to back it up (and this particular person didn’t have that data - just a far-fetched correlation), wrong conclusions are drawn. When you make actions based on those wrong conclusion, you’re in serious danger.
Be careful with correlation - make sure that the result you’re seeing is really due to the action you’re proposing it’s caused by. Don’t use incorrectly drawn conclusions to support your poorly researched ideas.
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You may not like it, but the market is always right. The market might be strange, might have fickle and illlogical taste, but it’s always right. As soon as you convince yourself that the market is wrong, you fail. Period.
Companies do this all the time. ”Our customers just don’t understand how great this is for them”, “We’re ahead of the times, they’ll catch up”, “Why aren’t people buying this stuff?! They need to know how awesome it is!”.
The problem is with control. As a company, you’re not in control. You don’t have any bargaining power when it comes to the market. If the market decides not to give you money, you’re dead. Too often, we try to change the market, instead of really finding out what the market wants/needs. Often, this is due to being overly precious about our products.
If people aren’t buying your stuff, it’s because you’re wrong, not the market.
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When you interact with your customers, you’re having a conversation. The trick is to realize what conversation you’re in.
Far too many companies and marketers try to force consumers into the conversation that they, the company, wants to have. The problem is, consumers are self-centered. They don’t want to talk about what you’re talking about. They want to have the conversation they’re already having.
This is lazy marketing. Instead of putting time and energy into honestly listening to others and truly caring about their conversation, it’s much easier to shout at them and hope they talk back.
The key, as made clear in the seminal book on relationships, How to Win Friends and Influence People byDale Carnegie, is to take a geniune interest in other people, not to assume you can get them to care about you. It takes work, and it takes restraint, but it’s the only way to be successful.
So, stop blasting out your messages and hoping people care. They don’t. Find out what they’re talking about and join in the conversation. As soon as you start to try to turn the conversation to your agenda, however, you fail. Be real, be genuine, and you’ll be trusted. When you’re trusted, you win.
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