via Email: Why People Feel Lying is Justified.

Recent experiment finds 50% more lies on email than pen and paper.

It’s hard to look someone straight in the eye and tell them a blatant lie. Those who can are marked out for more nefarious occupations. Like politics.

Over the telephone it’s easier. In a diary study 77 people recorded their everyday social interactions, noting down when they told lies and which medium they were using (DePaulo et al., 1994). Across two samples people reported telling lies more frequently over the phone than face-to-face.

The more detached people are from their interlocutor, the easier the lie becomes. This looks like bad news for both email and letters. Indeed the two forms of communication have much in common: both are written, both involve remote communication and both are a pain when you get too many of them.

But there the similarities end, especially in regard to trust. This is well-illustrated by a new study published recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology which examines how much people lie in emails compared with good old pen and paper (Naquin et al., 2010).

Lies increased 50%

In their first experiment 48 participants were told they had to split $89 between themselves and a partner who they hadn’t met. The trick was that the partner didn’t know the exact size of the pot, only that it was somewhere between $5 and $100. Participants then either sent an email or wrote a pen and paper note to their partner telling them the size of the pot and the allocation.

Actually there was no blind partner, it was a test to see what participants would do in the two mediums. In the event, over email 24 out of 26 people lied about the pot’s size, while in a different group of 26 participants using pen and paper, only 14 lied.

The fact that overall so many people lied is because of the experimental set-up, rather than because these participants were pathological liars. What’s important is the difference between the two conditions: that lying increased by 50% from pen and paper to email.

In some ways a more damning indictment of email from Naquin et al.’s study was that people reported feeling more justified in lying over email than they did when writing with pen and paper.

Across a further two experiments people consistently lied more over email and felt more justified in doing so, even when they were lying to someone they knew and when that person would find out. Participants seemed relatively unconcerned about the damage to their reputation caused by lying over email.

What is it, then, about email that is so different from a handwritten message?

To understand this Naquin et al. call upon a theory first put forward by eminent social psychologist Albert Bandura. Called moral disengagement theory, it tries to predict how people release themselves from their normal ethical standards, whether it’s playing fair, respecting others or telling the truth.

Two of these are (1) by changing how the offending actions are viewed and (2) by creating psychological distance from the harmful consequences of the action. Both of these are encouraged by three characteristics of email:

1. Less permanent: people think of it as a substitute for conversation rather than a letter. People feel they are ‘chatting’ more over email, rather than writing to each other. The impermanence of email is emphasised by a GMail feature which allows users to ‘unsend’ a message within 5 seconds of sending (instruction here).
2. Less restrained: as mentioned in this previous post onsocial networking profiles, people behave in a more disinhibited way online. Online exchanges show less conformity to social norms, people display much less restraint and are less worried about what others think of them.
3. Lower personal connection: studies show that online, people feel less trust and rapport with others, leaving them with a sense of disconnection.

All of these may lead people to feel low levels of accountability for their emails. Hence more fibs.

Spotting lies online

Most people have some awareness that email is open to abuse but nowadays it’s hard to avoid doing business online. Lawyers, real estate agents and accountants increasingly report using email for negotiations, but as this study underlines, there are dangers.

Recent research doesn’t offer much solace for those hoping to spot lies in emails. Examining online communications,Hancock et al. (2008) found that liars on average wrote 28% more words than truth-tellers and also used fewer self-oriented words, but that participants were unable to use this to work out when they were being deceived.

As well as lies, negativity is another standard problem in online communication. A study of the peer review process for scientific journal articles found that academics were systematically more negative about each other’s papers when the process was conducted online (Kurtzberg et al., 2005). The same study also found that performance reviews conducted online tend towards the negative.

Although email seems almost old-fashioned given that web years, like dog years, are so compressed, our culture is still adapting to what is an incredibly useful tool. Indeed some research has suggested that people lie less over email than they do face-to-face or over the telephone (Hancock et al., 2004).

So there’s hope for the old dog yet.

via Email: Why People Feel Lying is Justified.

This is a fantastic analysis of the social fuel that keeps games like Farmville growing…

Written by A. J. Liszkiewicz ⇒

Originally published on MediaCommons.com Published: March 9, 2010 ⇒

Cultivated Play: Farmville

[This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk.]

“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing.”
— Howard Zinn

The great social historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, died yesterday of a heart attack. Zinn devoted his life to educating Americans in their country’s history, that they might better understand their place in its present. Such understanding is today at a premium. Ours is a time of confusion, of unprecedented changes that outpace our perceptions. As Zinn might have said, the wheel keeps spinning faster, and the faster it spins the harder it is to see.

At such times, and at such speeds, the task of educating ourselves becomes all the more urgent. We are citizens of a democracy, and democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master. This is why Aristotle tells us that, in an ideal state, citizens would possess ample leisure time: the education of a citizen depends upon contemplation, deliberation, and training. Citizenship requires cultivation and, as any farmer would tell us, cultivation takes time.

Perhaps it seems a waste of time to discuss video games at a moment like this. After all, this is a serious discussion, and games are supposedly frivolous things. Most any concerned parent might say, “Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money….”[1] So said Roger Caillois in his book, Man, Play, and Games. Of course, Caillois went on to praise games as a source of joy, as well as a healthy means of “escape from responsibility and routine.”[2] For Caillois, as for Aristotle, games are in fact essential to citizenship: they allow us to refresh and renew ourselves, help to socialize us, and afford us opportunities to cultivate our imaginations and reasoning skills.[3]

If games are essential to citizenship, then this could be a promising time for our democracy. According to a recent survey, over half of American adults play video games, and one in five play everyday or almost everyday. Does this mean we are becoming better citizens? Ninety-seven percent of American teenagers play video games.[4] Does this mean they will become more politically active? Before you dismiss these questions, keep in mind that in October 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama became the first U. S. Presidential candidate to advertise in video games, when his “Early Voting Has Begun” ads appeared in Madden 2009, Burnout Paradise, and other Electronic Arts video games.[5]

Much has been made of President Obama’s sophisticated use of new media technologies. He utilized the internet extensively in organizing and raising funds for his campaign, and has maintained an active presence on popular social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. To illustrate, he is currently taking questions about last night’s State of the Union address via YouTube, and plans to answer those questions next week in a live, online video feed.[6] While it remains unclear how such events are affecting politics, it is clear that new media technologies pervade the sociopolitical realm. So we cannot simply dismiss video games and Facebook as mere ‘wastes of time.’ Instead, we are obligated to educate ourselves about them, and to try to understand what they mean, and what it means that we use them.

With this in mind, it seems appropriate to examine the most popular video game in America. Farmville is a free, browser-based video game that is played through one’s Facebook account. Users harvest crops, decorate their farms, and interact with one another, in what is ostensibly a game about farming. While this may sound like a relatively banal game, over seventy-three million people play Farmville.[7] Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.[8] This popularity is not surprising per se; even in the current recession, video game revenues reached nearly twenty billion dollars in America last year.[9] The video games industry is a vibrant one, and there is certainly room in it for more good games.

Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again. This doesn’t sound like much fun, Mr. Caillois. Why would anyone do this?

One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely because they invest physical effort and in-game profit into each harvest. This seems plausible enough: people work over time to develop something, and take pride in the fruits of their labor. Farmville allows users to spend their in-game profits on decorations, animals, buildings, and even bigger plots of land. So users are rewarded for their work. Of course, people can sidestep the harvesting process entirely by spending real money to purchase in-game items. This is the major source of revenue for Zynga, the company that produces Farmville. Zynga is currently on pace to make over three hundred million dollars in revenue this year, largely off of in-game micro-transactions.[10] Clearly, even people who play Farmville want to avoid playing Farmville.

If people don’t play Farmville because of the play itself, perhaps they play because of the rewards. Users can customize their farms with ponds, fences, statues, houses, and even Christmas trees, and compare their farms with those of their friends. It’s important to note that Farmville is a public game, shared with friends across the largest social networking site in America. It makes sense that some people would enjoy the aesthetics of Farmville, of designing and arranging their farms. No doubt some users want to show off their handiwork, and impress and compete with their virtual neighbors. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine seventy-three million people playing a game that isn’t fun to play, just to keep up with the Joneses. After all, we have real life for that sort of thing.

Even Zynga’s designers seem well aware that their game is repetitive and shallow. As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious. Meanwhile, Zynga is constantly adding new items and giveaways to Farmville, often at the suggestion of their users. Hardly a week goes by that a new color of cat isn’t available for purchase. What fun.

Again: if Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it? The answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.

My mother began playing Farmville last fall, because her friend asked her to join and become her in-game neighbor. In Farmville, neighbors send you gifts, help tend your farm, post bonuses to their Facebook pages, and allow you to earn larger plots of land. Without at least eight in-game neighbors, in fact, it is almost impossible to advance in Farmville without spending real money. This frustrating reality led my mother—who was now obligated to play because of her friend—to convince my father, two of her sisters, my fiancée and (much to my dismay) myself to join Farmville. Soon, we were all scheduling our days around harvesting, sending each other gifts of trees and elephants, and posting ribbons on our Facebook walls. And we were convincing our own friends to join Farmville, too. Good times.

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

One wonders if this is a good thing. It is difficult to imagine Aristotle or Caillois celebrating Farmville as essential to citizenship. Indeed, when one measures Farmville against Roger Caillois’ six criteria for defining games, Farmville fails to satisfy each and every one. Caillois stated that games must be free from obligation, separate from ‘real life,’ uncertain in outcome, an unproductive activity, governed by rules, and make-believe.[12] In comparison:

(1) Farmville is defined by obligation, routine, and responsibility;
(2) Farmville encroaches and depends upon real life, and is never entirely separate from it;
(3) Farmville is always certain in outcome, and involves neither chance nor skill;
(4) Farmville is a productive activity, in that it adds to the social capital upon which Facebook and Zynga depend for their wealth;
(5) Farmville is governed not by rules, but by habits, and simple cause-and-effect;
(6) Farmville is not make-believe, in that it requires neither immersion nor suspension of disbelief.

Of these points, the fourth is the most troubling. While playing Farmville might not qualify as work or labor, it is certainly a productive activity, as playing Farmville serves to enlarge and strengthen social capital. Capital is defined as “any form of wealth employed or capable of being employed in the production of more wealth.”[13] New media companies like Zynga and Facebook depend upon such wealth in generating revenue, just as President Obama depends on social capital to raise money, to organize, and to communicate. Unlike President Obama, though, Zynga is not an elected official, and is not obligated to act with the public’s interests in mind.

Zynga has recently used Farmville to raise almost one million dollars to support earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.[14] Social capital can allow organizations to do great and noble things, and to do so quickly and efficiently. Zynga actually began its charitable efforts with Haiti last fall, around the time my family began playing Farmville. Also at this time, Zynga was engaged in numerous “lead gen scams,” or advertisements that trick customers into making purchases or subscribing to services. As of November, one third of Zynga’s revenue (roughly eighty million dollars) came from third-party commercial offers, such as Netflix subscriptions that came with Farmville bonuses, or surveys that involved hidden contractual obligations.[15] One user reportedly was charged almost two hundred dollars one month, as a result of cell-phone services for which she had unknowingly signed up, while following Farmville ads in search of bonuses.[16] So many users were scammed, in fact, that Zynga and Facebook are now involved in a related, multi-million-dollar class action lawsuit.[17]

The wheel keeps spinning, faster and faster. More people are signing up to play Farmville every day, as well as other similar Zynga games, such as Mafia Wars, YoVille, and Café World. Analysts estimate that, if the company goes public in the summer of 2010, Zynga will be worth between one and three billion dollars.[18] This value depends in its entirety on the social capital generated by users, like you and me, who obligate one another to play games like Farmville. Whether this strikes you as a scam or just shrewd business is beside the point. The most important thing to recognize here is that, whether we like it or not, seventy-three million people are playing Farmville: a boring, repetitive, and potentially dangerous activity that barely qualifies as a game. Seventy-three million people are obligated to a company that holds no reciprocal ethical obligation toward those people.

It is precisely at a moment like this—when Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has made it legal for corporations to spend unlimited monies on political advertisements—that we must talk about our relationship to corporations, and to one another. We are obligated to examine what we are doing, whether we are updating our Facebook status or playing Call of Duty, because the results of those actions will ultimately be our burden, for better or for worse. We must learn above all to distinguish between the better and the worse. Citizens must educate themselves in the use of sociable applications, such as Wikipedia, Skype, and Facebook, and learn how they can better use them to forward their best interests. And we must learn to differentiate sociable applications from sociopathic applications: applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners’ needs.

As cultivated citizens, we are obligated to one another. We care about one another. As Cornel West has said, democracy depends upon demophilia, or love of the people.[19] Unfortunately, sociopathic companies such as Zynga depend upon this love as well. The central task of citizenship is learning how to be good to one another, even when—especially when—it is difficult to understand our own actions. If Howard Zinn had but one lesson to teach us, it is that cultivated citizens must constantly look around and examine what they’re doing, because there is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else’s crop.

–

[1] Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961 (pp. 5-6).
[2] Ibid (p. 6).
[3] See Aristotle, Politics, from line 30 of 1337b, to line 15 of 1338a; see Caillois, ibid, pp. 37-41.
[4] These statistics were derived from a PEW Internet Project Data Memo, dated 7 December 2008 (http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2008/PIP_Adult_gaming_…).
[5] This was reported in various media outlets, including The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/14/obama-video-game-ads-feat_n_134…) and Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,437763,00.html).
[6] See AFP article, “Obama to take questions via YouTube, answer them online,” 27 Jan. 2010 (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g0E0ZXCheQrRnvquv2DaS…)
[7] Fussell, James. “The Farmville Craze is a Firmly Planted Phenomenon.” The Kansas City Star 22 Jan. 2010 (http://www.kansascity.com/851/v-print/story/1692350.html)
[8] Newheiser, Mark. “Farmville, Social Gaming, and Addiction.” Gamasutra 04 Dec. 2009 (http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkNewheiser/20091204/3733/Farmville_Soc…).
[9] Ferro, Mike. “2009 Video Game Industry Revenue Breakdown.” Gamer.Blorge 16 Jan. 2010. (http://gamer.blorge.com/2010/01/16/2009-video-game-industry-revenue-brea…)
[10] Reuters Blog, 17 Dec. 2009 (http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/12/17/facebook-nearing-1-billion…).
[11] Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. Chapter One of version available online at Google Books France (http://books.google.fr/books?id=xlkVAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Marc…).
[12] Caillois, ibid, pp. 9-10.
[13] http://www.dictionary.com/
[14] http://www.ventureloop.com/ventureloop/startup_news_article.php?natId=67…
[15] Arrington, Michael. “Scamville.” TechCrunch 02 Nov. 2009 (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/scamville-zynga-says-13-of-revenue-…).
[16] Lusicombe, Belinda. “The Troubling Rise of Facebook’s Top Game Company.” Time Online 30 Nov. 2009.
[17] Arrington, Michael. “The Scamville Lawsuit.” TechCrunch 12 Nov. 2009 (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/12/the-scamville-lawsuit-facebook-mysp…).
[18] http://mashable.com/2009/12/15/huge-farmville-maker-zynga-raises-an-asto…
[19] West, Cornel and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The Future of American Progressivism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998 (p. 12).

Co-written with Greg Nudelman ⇒

Originally published on UXMatters.com Published: April 13, 2009 ⇒

Web site user assistance that consistently exceeds customer’s expectations can catapult your company to legendary status and create brand equity you can measure in billions of dollars. However, making Help a strategic asset for your company is an arduous task. To shed light on this important topic, I have teamed up with Tricia Clement, a renowned cognitive psychologist and Web site user assistance expert. In this month’s Search Matters column, we’ll deliver actionable insights about Web site user assistance.

Aspirin Versus Vitamins

We can broadly classify Web site user assistance content or components as either

• aspirin—solutions that address an acute problem for people who need assistance right now
• vitamins—solutions for process optimization and longer-term learning and training

Aspirin Help should immediately alleviate the, hopefully, short-term pain of an acute problem. Problems in need of Aspirin Help represent clear diversions from customers’ desired tasks and usually arise when customers are completely stuck and looking for an immediate fix to their problems.

A customer’s mindset when looking for such content is that of fear—for example, a fear of losing money, losing time, or feeling stupid. The natural response to such fear is usually anger and frustration, a highly emotional state, and Aspirin Help solutions need to take the customer’s complex emotional state into account. Aspirin Help content must present a straightforward and simple way to address the customer’s immediate problem, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1—Aspirin Super Saver Shipping Help on Amazon.com

Unlike Aspirin Help solutions that offer immediate fixes, Vitamin Help solutions maximize user effectiveness on a Web site. Vitamins are preventative in nature. You need to take them in advance. So customers need to read Vitamin Help before performing tasks and interactions for it to be effective. Generally, Vitamin Help comes in the form of tutorials and articles that you expect customers to review with a calmer mindset, when seeking opportunities for gradual learning with the goal of obtaining beneficial long-term knowledge and skills. As Figure 2 shows, Vitamin Help solutions can be much more sophisticated, taking the form of interactive multipage tutorials or video presentations.

Figure 2—Vitamin Help—A J2EE tutorial on Sun.com

Given these different and distinct uses for Help content, it is beneficial to classify Help content using the following three attributes:

1. immediacy—Aspirin Help versus Vitamin Help
2. depth of knowledge—how versus the why of how
3. touch—static content versus a phone call

Each axis in Figure 3 represents one of the attributes we can use to evaluate each component of a Help system to determine whether it is appropriate to the task, the existing level of customer knowledge, the task’s level of complexity, and the sensitivity of the issue.

Figure 3—Three attributes of Web site user assistance

When evaluating the appropriateness of Help content to each specific use case, it is important to consider where your content falls along each of these attribute axes.

Stick to Established Best Practices

People expect to find Help even faster and easier than they can find your merchandise or content, so in most cases, it is safest to stick with the established mental models and design practices for Web site user assistance. People often have a strong mental model for how Help systems should work. Deviating from that mental model and forcing people to think harder when they are already confused is likely to lead to anger and frustration. Most examples of good Web site user assistance follow a similar design, often including the following components:

• proactive inline Help
• a single Help landing page
• navigation that is optimized for browsing rather than keyword search
• complete Help solutions through multiple landing pages

On the best Web sites, these components work together to provide effective user assistance.

Proactive Inline Help

Inline Help provides the first line of defense against customer frustration by proactively offering both Aspirin and Vitamin Help content where you know your customers are most likely to need it. Inline Help is part of the site’s integral functionality. Where necessary, it is more extensive, but may be absent entirely where functionality is familiar or easy to understand. Figure 4 shows the excellent inline Help Netflix provides to help customers put an account on hold. There is enough information embedded on the page to enable confident on-the-spot decision making. There’s no need to navigate anywhere else for more information. It even explains how to reactivate the account later on.

Figure 4—Excellent inline Help on Netflix.com

Good inline Help is preferable to all other types of Help, because customer expectations for inline Help are low. Inline Help often delights customers, because of the care and attention a company has invested in placing the right Help where customers need it most. People usually perceive inline Help as easy to follow and, in most cases, it can painlessly take care of 90% of customers’ need for assistance.

A Single Help Landing Page

For reasons of neglect or internal politics, many sites end up requiring customers to seek the information they need on many different pages—for example, Help, Top Questions, FAQ, Troubleshooting, Learning Center, or University. Offering dispersed collections of content without a single, well-integrated Help landing page often confuses customers about what kinds of Help are available and which content might actually support the need at hand. The best Web sites provide a single Help landing page where customers can obtain Help of all kinds:

• Help search
• common questions
• a Help index
• contact information, including email addresses, phone numbers, and chat and community links

One of the best examples of a single Help landing page is that for TurboTax, shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5—An excellent Help landing page for TurboTax

This page presents a clear process customers can easily follow to resolve their problems. Most options are clearly organized. However, customers must click a link to see a complete index of Help topics.

Amazon also provides an excellent Help landing page, shown in Figure 6. Note their relatively recent addition of a prominent Contact Us button. This is an improvement over their former Help page, which required customers to choose a category before seeing the Contact Us button.

Figure 6—Improved Help landing page on Amazon

Note that the Amazon Help landing page devotes a great deal of critical real estate to selling Kindle. While it may seem like a good idea to market the new device, the Help landing page is not the best place for promoting products. First, too much information about Kindle on the Help may naturally raise some questions about how many problems someone could expect when using the device. Second, people with real problems to solve might be annoyed by seeing so much distracting promotional content.

Navigation That Is Optimized for Browsing Rather Than Keyword Search

So where does search come into Help best practices? The truth is that simple keyword search is by far the weakest link in the Web site user assistance experience. Ray Bradbury famously wrote: “You need to know part of the answer in order to ask the right question.” In other words, a person seeking Help has to know the right terms to type into the search box, and often, they do not. Therefore, keyword search is often a customer’s last resort before contacting customer support.

The good news is that, precisely because people are not familiar with a topic for which they are seeking Help, they are more likely to type in very general terms. Thus, designers should optimize the finding experience for general keywords and offer additional links to encourage exploration, making the experience far closer to browsing than to traditional keyword search. Even the simple search powerhouse Google opted for a friendlier browsable interface for their Help page, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7—Browsable Help page on Google

A specialized use case for searching Help is that of searching for theexact text of an error message when troubleshooting a problem. Advanced technical knowledge systems like Oracle MetaLink and the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) are optimized for this type of search. However, even for this use case, the user interface is closer to that for browsing than it is to traditional search. Notice that the MSDN Help search results in Figure 8 look very different from the kinds of search results we’ve examined previously in this column—the results that appear when customers search for specific items or content.

Figure 8—MSDN Support Search Results

Gone are the prominent refinement controls, sort controls, and classification aspects from each row in the search results. Instead, each search result is considerably more prominent, with a text summary and multiple links to related items to encourage lateral exploration. Depending on the sophistication of an audience, such a page might also include some very general refinement controls for topic or content type. However, in the best systems, these filters are seldom prominent. The designer’s ultimate focus should be on providing a complete solution, including lots of links that let customers navigate laterally or even widentheir search instead of constraining it further.

Complete Help Solutions Through Multiple Landing Pages

The best Help systems strive to provide a complete solution. On the HP Help site shown in Figure 9, the LaserJet Printer page is a landing page that provides all of the available Aspirin Help and Vitamin Help links for that printer, including user manuals, printer drivers, and setup guides. If just learning how to do something does not satisfy a customer, there are also lots of links to more sophisticated information that communicates thewhy of how, including links to support forums, upgrades, and parts.

Figure 9—HP LaserJet Help landing page—a complete solution

Even though, in this case, a customer arrived at the HP LaserJet Help landing page by searching for Help, the user experience is much more that of a browsing user interface that gently guides customers to a complete Help solution for a product, offering links for further investigation.

Creating a Comprehensive User Assistance Strategy

To put all of your Web site user assistance content into action, you need a comprehensive experience strategy. A good user assistance strategy has four goals, as follows:

1. Manage expectations.
2. Show that you care.
3. Strive for an easy Help experience.
4. Finish on a positive note.

Next, let’s discuss the four goals of a user assistance strategy in more detail.

Manage Expectations

B.J. Fogg popularized the notion that computers can change people’s thoughts and behaviors in predictable ways. One of the critical functions of a user assistance system is managing the strong emotions that arise when customers have unfulfilled expectations after interacting with an application. That’s why, when designing Help content, managing expectations should be a top concern. Expectations affect user emotions such as delight or frustration, and strong emotions translate directly into brand perception and brand equity. Unfulfilled expectations cause strong negative emotions and damage customer perception of your brand—often in ways that you cannot rectify later, because customers are unwilling to give you another chance. The good news is that Help is exactly the feature in which small delights can quickly add up to a very positive overall experience.

As shown in Figure 10, Overstock expertly manages expectations on their Contact Us page. The page clearly communicates that the waiting time for live chat is less than 2 minutes; for email support, less than 1 business day; and phone hold time is only 1–2 minutes.

Figure 10—Overstock expertly manages expectations for waiting time

A general strategy for managing expectations is as follows:

1. Set low expectations for a process, in terms of its cost/benefit ratio.
2. Work hard to exceed expectations and delight your customers.
3. Cry just once. If you must disappoint your customers, do it in one big blow, then move on.
4. Delight customers often, in many small ways.
5. Delight customers in ways that never get old—for example, through your competence.

As for the zero search results pages I described in my first Search Matters column, it is important to treat Help not as a fatal breakdown in communication between your site and your users, but as an opportunity to exceed expectations and delight your customers.

Show That You Care

Human beings are social animals who want to feel someone cares about them. In the context of providing Help, caring means:

• providing the right assistance in the right place at the right time
• using the level of explanation that is appropriate to the task
• never forcing customers to learn, but instead providing straight-forward, clear answers with lots of options to learn more
• providing information that is appropriate to the knowledge level of a customer
• never making people feel stupid by giving them the wrong answer, providing circuitous navigation, or offering unclear explanations.

If people feel that you care, they automatically trust that a Help system is suggesting what’s best for them and don’t scrutinize its content as much. In other words, the feeling that someone cares reduces people’s need to think about the quality of an answer. People generally prefer to trust information rather than having to think, because thinking can be hard work and takes energy.

Sometimes a company’s biggest problem can be the perception that it has grown so large that it no longer cares about individual customers. This perception can incite furious responses to even the smallest of infractions. Some big companies go to great lengths to show they do in fact care, but few manage to come across as sincere. Figure 11 shows the Travelocity Bill of Rights along with its signature gnome character.

Figure 11—Travelocity shows it cares

Because Travelocity has made caring for customers an integral part of their brand, customers generally perceive its Bill of Rights as a sign of genuine caring, so it gets a positive response from most customers.

Strive for an Easy Help Experience

When customers say That was easy after using Help, their evaluation encompasses both their expectations and their satisfaction with the Help system’s performance. We suspect that’s why Staples has made this phrase their slogan. To ensure customers feel getting help was easy, you have to do both of the following:

• Set the right expectations at the start—never overpromise!
• Ensure customers feel like they’re making progress toward a solution with each thing they do.

The path to resolve a problem can take hours and still seem easy, as long as people expect the path to be long and don’t ever feel confused or stuck along the way. Part of making a long process feel easy has to do with the feeling of flow Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularized. The Travelocity user assistance, shown in Figure 12, does a good job of maintaining a sense of flow by providing both Related Answers andPreviously Viewed Answers.

Figure 12—Travelocity offers useful links

A Help system can maintain good task flow by providing a clear path for a customer to follow, as well as lots of relevant links, ensuring the delivery of a complete solution to the customer’s issue.

Finish on a Positive Note

In user assistance, designers should do everything possible to provide a positive finish, even if it means taking a phone call—Horrors!—or offering a free gift. Finishing on a positive note is especially important for user assistance experiences that started with a strongly negative event like a stolen credit card, a broken item, or delayed shipping. Strong negative emotions directly affect customers’ brand perception. However, a weak negative finish has no effect on your brand perception, unless it happens again and again.

One of the ways you can finish on a positive note is to let customers provide feedback once the Help system presents an answer. In addition to showing a company cares, feedback lets the Help system dynamically choose what content to show next and shows where you need to expand your content to benefit your other customers.

Unfortunately, few companies ask customers for feedback effectively. Figure 13 shows a particularly cumbersome example of a feedback form for the Sun J2EE tutorial.

Figure 13—A cumbersome, non-contextual feedback form

How many busy people would navigate to another page and take the time to fill out this long form? The form asks users to select a chapter. Do users have to fill out this form multiple times to provide feedback on different chapters? Who would know better what version of the tutorial a user is reviewing—the company or the customer? While this form feels like a typical, long form for contacting customer support, it includes this disclaimer: “We do not respond to everyone.” This kind of long form isnot a good way to ask your customers for some quick feedback, and it does not, therefore, provide a positive finish.

In contrast to the Sun tutorial, the most effective user assistance feedback is

• contextual—It provides the ability for a customer to give feedback on every chapter and every solution page when viewing it and does notrequire them to navigate to another page to give feedback.
• immediate—It does not ask customers for their name or email address or require them to sign in. If you force customers to register, most people will provide fake or disposable credentials to avoid receiving spam. Often, a Help system can readily capture a customer’s identity from a cookie, so there is no need for customers to identify themselves.
• simple—One simple, but effective method of providing feedback is tagging, which is sadly underutilized in Help systems. Tagging is both powerful and versatile. Tags can describe quality (“good”), topic (“tutorial”), keywords (“J2EE”), and much more. You can aggregate tags in tag clouds or lists and use them to enhance keyword search for your Help system.

Putting It All Together

User assistance that consistently exceeds customers’ expectations can catapult your company to the status of industry leader and greatly increase your brand equity. However, designing a great Help system is no easy task.

To design an optimal user assistance experience, it is important to think holistically about all of the touchpoints along the way. To serve the right Help at the right time, it helps to classify Help content along three separate attributes: immediacy, depth of knowledge, and touch. Web site user assistance involves a multipronged approach that includes inline Help, a single Help landing page, and browsable navigation, while keeping a clear focus on providing a complete solution for your customers.

To orchestrate a compelling user experience, think about how delivering user assistance is like a creating story, a film, or a motivational talk. A Help system needs to manage expectations, maintain task flow, and demonstrate that a company genuinely cares about its customers. It helps to think of a user assistance experience as an emotional journey—delighting people in small ways as the journey progresses and finishing on a strong positive note. Understanding and using the power of emotions to create a compelling, positive brand experience should be the primary goal behind a Help system.

Bibliography

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. London: HarperCollins, 1992.

Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.

Fogg, B.J. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.

Friedman, Batya. Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Miller, Christopher A., Editor. “Human-Computer Etiquette: Managing Expectations with Intentional Agents.” Communications of the ACM, 47(4), 31-61, 2004.

Norman, Donald A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Nudelman, Greg. “Starting from Zero: Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages.”UXmatters, February 9, 2009. Retrieved March 25, 2009.

Picard, Rosalind W. Affective Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

Smith, Gene. Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. Berkeley: Peachpit Press, 2008.

Wroblewski, Luke. Web Form Design: Filling In the Blanks. New York: Rosenfeld Media, 2008.