New recorded webinar, and a price cut

Can’t get enough mental models? Disappointed that you missed Indi Young’s excellent live webinar? Then there’s hope: Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy is now available as a downloadable DRM-free recording. It runs about 70 minutes; you can view a 2.5 minute preview of it here, read an interview with Indi here, and read the attendees’ tweets here.
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Better survey invitations and reminders

Question: What’s the difference between a survey and a questionnaire?

Answer: A survey is a process; a questionnaire is the series of questions and answers in the middle of that process.

It’s easy to focus on the questionnaire to the exclusion of other important aspects of the survey. A couple of examples in my in-box recently reminded me about the importance of the survey invitation and the reminder.

The untrustworthy invitation

Here’s the top of a survey invitation that I received recently. I’ve anonymized the organization that sent it and the link to the survey itself.

For purposes of research, I tend to respond to every survey invitation I get if I possibly can, but this one shouted ‘spam’ at me. Why?

• It’s not addressed to me. It’s addressed to #fullname#.
• The incentive seems rather high for a survey. 25 euros (approx US $36) guaranteed? For 10 minutes?
• And a bit further down, not shown in this screenshot, there was an address of a US corporation but the contact email address was in the Netherlands.

I was hesitant.

Response relies on trust, perceived effort and perceived reward

Let’s look at it from the point of view of Dillman’s Social Exchange Theory. This says that people will respond to your survey if the perceived reward, which doesn’t have to be monetary, is in balance with the perceived effort – but only if they trust you. And if you’re exceptionally trustworthy, then being nice to you is itself a reward. Think about a mother, patiently answering a series of ‘why’ questions from a three-year-old; it’s likely that mother will keep answering until the perceived effort just becomes too much. (The most recent edition of Dillman’s book is Dillman, Smyth and Christian (2008), my January 2011 Survey Book of the Month).

Strangely enough, if the reward is excessive for the perceived effort, then that undermines trust – exactly what happened to me in the example above. And the trust wasn’t great in the first place: that dodgy saluation and the mismatch of sender and email address also worked to undermine trust.

The outcome? Well, in the interest of research I did click through – and the survey seemed perfectly genuine but I didn’t qualify because my business has fewer than 500 employees. I wonder what response rate they did get. Would those features that put me off have inspired trust in a busy HR manager is a large business? I suspect not.

A reminder that looks like a reproach

Then a couple of days later, a friend forwarded this survey reminder to me:

Recently, we sent you an invitation to complete a Guest Satisfaction Survey concerning your stay with us at XXX YYYY, where you checked out on August 3, 2011.

We noticed that you did not have time to complete the survey. We are concerned that you may not have responded because we have somehow failed to live up to your expectations.

At XXXX, we are committed to providing a superior guest experience to every customer.

Please take a few minutes to tell us how well we met your expectations.

To complete the survey, please click on the web address below. If that does not work, please copy and paste the entire web address into the address field of your browser.

http://survey.xxxxxx

Thank you again for choosing XXXX. I look forward to hearing about your stay with us.

Sincerely,

Dave ZZZZ

Manager,

XXXXX Hotels

————
Please do not ‘Reply’ directly to this invitation.

Technical assistance: Should you have any problems accessing or completing this survey, please e-mail our survey vendor at hhctechsupport.xxxx.com

To unsubscribe: We rely on feedback from guests to ensure that your hotel stay meets and exceeds your expectations. If, however, you prefer not to receive a survey invitation in the future, you may unsubscribe by clicking this link:
http://survey.xxx

For all other requests, please visit http://www.xxxx

My friend forwarded it to me with the comment “How to be annoying. I didn’t know that I am somehow obligated”. Needless to say, she didn’t respond.

Let’s look for the reward. Hmm. I can’t see one. What’s in it for my friend? It seems she’s missing out on an opportunity to complain. But she didn’t have a complaint about her stay – only about her survey reminder!

Another way people can feel rewarded is if they’re made to feel special; if they’re picked out as one of a small group who is being asked to respond to an important survey that will influence a major business decision. So is there anything in this reminder to make her feel like an individual whose opinion is valued?

No, rather the reverse. It says:

At XXXX, we are committed to providing a superior guest experience to every customer.

Maybe you read this sentence differently, but to me it has the effect of reminding her that she’s just one of the crowd, nothing special.

And finally, look at these mixed messages:

I look forward to hearing about your stay with us.

Please do not ‘Reply’ directly to this invitation.

He doesn’t really want to hear from her, because she’s not allowed to write to him. He only wants to increase the response rate on his survey.

A survey invitation has three purposes

Your survey invitation needs to do three things:

1. Offer a preceived reward.
2. Explain the amount of effort.
3. Inspire trust.

Offer a perceived reward

People like to do nice things. If you can make your respondent feel
special in some way, that can act as a reward. Obviously, a financial
payment can work – but not if using that payment, or getting the
payment, will be a huge hassle for the respondent.

A delayed reward is definitely less effective than an immediate one – as I discussed in my post Do incentives help to improve response rates?

Explain the amount of effort

I have to admit that I’m still researching the question of explaining the amount of effort. I think two factors are operating:

1. The possible benefit from saying how long a survey is, either in minutes or as a number of questions
2. Widespread cynicism about the value of these promises.

Personally, I’ve experienced questionnaires that promised to be ‘short’ but actually took me 30 minutes or more. It’s also tricky to predict how many questions a person will have to answer if your questionnaire has skips (places where you can route an inappropriate question).

I’m hoping to find some data to tell us how long people expect a questionnaire to be, and whether that varies by topic or by the organization that’s asking.

Features that inspire trust

I’m still looking for research on the features of a survey invitation or reminder that inspire trust. Meanwhile, I think we can transfer ideas from research on features of web sites in general that inspire trust, such as the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility.

For example:

Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

If you’re doing a survey on behalf of an organization that’s known to your users, and I assume respected by them, then I interpret ‘look professional’ to mean: Make it look “designed” and make sure that it clearly communicates the brand.

Here are two examples that I got this week. The two brands are John Lewis, middle-to-upmarket department stores, and Champneys, a spa. I’m a happy customer of both, regularly shopping with John Lewis (at the store and online), and occasionally treating myself to a visit to the spa. Here are mini versions of the home pages of their respective web sites.

 

To my eyes, there’s a certain similarity: both brands rely on a reasonably restrained use of a specific color palette (dark green/gray/while for John Lewis; dusky brown/light brown/gold for Champneys) to complement large, striking images.

Now let’s look at their two survey invitations, side by side. I’ve made them quite small so we can focus on the overall impression of the design.

Both of them look designed and professional, but I see the Champneys one as being much better at conveying the brand – and giving me the idea that filling in their survey might even be a pleasurable experience.

Tips for better invitations and reminders

Your user’s experience of your survey starts with the invitation. If you want to improve the response rate:

• Look first at the trust. Have you made it clear who you are? Is the person likely to know you, and if not have you made it easy for them to find out that you’re trustworthy? Does your invitation look as carefully considered and designed as the rest of your brand?
• Then check perceived reward. Why would this person want to be nice to your organization in the context of this request?
• Then check perceived effort. What will the respondents get in return? Is this all about you, or is there something in it for them?
• And finally: Test! Test! Test! Make sure your testing includes the invitation and any reminders. Don’t let silly mistakes like sending your invitation to #fullname# ruin your survey.

UX in all the Odd Places

I had a bit of a crisis last fall. My pal Andrew Mayfield asked me to keynote UX New Zealand. Of course I was dying to go to New Zealand. But they wanted me to give a new talk, and the very thought makes me sweat. What new things might I have to say about UX? Do I even do UX anymore?

After all, these days I spend my time putting out books and putting on conferences. Web sites and apps? Not so much. I’m not even sure I know the difference between a breakpoint and a touchpoint. So who am I to talk to UX practitioners about UX? 25+ years in the field, yet here I was, suffering from an acute case of imposter syndrome.

Many false starts, meltdowns, and 4am Keynote sessions later, I finally had a breakthrough. It’s not that I don’t do UX anymore. It’s that UX applies to way more than apps and web sites. In fact, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade doing extensive UX work on traditional products, like books, and physical experiences, like conferences. So that’s exactly what I covered in my UXNZ keynote. Books and conferences are experiential, so yep: the work still counts as UX.

D’uh. I guess it’s one of those oh-so-obvious observations that aren’t so obvious when they pertain to you.

But it is a liberating feeling. And it’s renewed my excitement about UX, because:where doesn’t UX apply?

Conferences offer almost unlimited opportunities to UX the hell out of stuff. With our last virtual conference—Product Management + User Experience—we found that basing our program on user research was immensely valuable, helping us select both speakers and topics. And many of you agreed; there was a strong correlation between your participation in program planning and your desire to actually attend the event.

So we’re doing it again with our next virtual conference—Design Research for Everyone, which is slated for some time this fall. Here’s our question: What do people who aren’t UX practitioners need to learn about design research?

Please help us do our user research by letting us know who should speak and on which topics—and sharing this with others who might be interested.

What odd contexts are you finding ripe for UX? Please comment below; I’d love to hear your stories of UX in non-traditional places.

Excerpt: Chapter One of our Newest Title, From Solo to Scaled by Natalie M. Dunbar

Chapter 1

The Content Strategy Practice Blueprint

I’m fascinated by buildings: single family structures, high-rise dwellings, and especially office towers. As such, I’ve always had a healthy curiosity about the construction process. For example, Figure 1.1 shows a Habitat for Humanity building that I worked on. From the initial breaking of ground to the completion of a building’s façade, I find comfort in both the art and order of construction—how foundations support columns, columns support beams, and beams support floors. When the building plans are followed as written, every element comes together perfectly to create a strong structure that is capable of withstanding natural elements like wind and earthquakes.

In my career as a content strategist, I’ve heard colleagues speak about “standing up a team,” or “standing up a practice.” There was familiarity in the concept of building a figurative structure that had a specific function or purpose. And, of course, that familiarity stemmed from my fascination with buildings, so the construction metaphor made sense to me.

That metaphor also reminded me of one of my favorite books, Why Buildings Stand Up, by Mario Salvadori. Before writing and content strategy became my full-time job, I worked in various roles in residential and commercial real estate. All of those roles exposed me to various phases of building construction and tenant improvements, and reading Salvadori’s book helped me understand construction and architecture in an engaging way.

The familiarity I felt when hearing the phrase “stand up a practice” in the digital experience world often stopped short of the idea of the building metaphor. For example, practices were “stood up” with no attention to order. Foundations were poured before soil tests were completed, often resulting in skipping the addition of the footings that might be needed to support the foundation, or in the case of the practice, doing the work to ensure that the practice followed the necessary processes to create digital experiences that met the needs of users as well as the goal of the client or business. And inevitably, the structure—or the practice—began to crumble.

And sometimes those practices failed completely.

From the Ground Up

Having had the opportunity to build an agency-based content strategy practice from the ground up, and later expanding and maintaining an existing practice within a mid-to-large sized organization, I began to see that failures often happened because steps crucial to supporting the structure had been skipped. Or perhaps the structure had been compromised because the framework used to build it—if one was used at all—couldn’t withstand the constant stress of tension and compression.

When I started to think about what caused these seemingly strong practices to crumble—I returned to the building and construction metaphor to look for possible answers. That’s because it’s sometimes easier to, er, construct a mental model that’s more tangible than the nebulousness nature of digital information spaces.

If the building metaphor still feels a bit weird to you, then try this: think of the last time someone asked what you did for a living. If you’re a UX practitioner, or if you collaborate with members of a UX team, you’ve likely experienced the feeling of the listener’s eyes glazing over as you tried to explain the concept of user experience—or as I once saw it described, “making websites and apps stink less.” Then think of what might happen if you described the user experience using a more relatable metaphor, such as one of the following:

• The internet is a space.
• A website or mobile app is a destination within that space (and in the case of websites, a space complete with its own address).
• The work you do helps people avoid getting lost in that space.

In keeping with this theme, now imagine that the opportunity that’s immediately in front of you—that of building a UX-focused content strategy practice—is a pristine plot of land. Provided you have a solid plan and the right materials and tools, this untilled soil is ready for you to break ground and to stand up a healthy content strategy practice.

So this figurative plot of land you’ve been given needs someone—you—to till the soil and prepare the space for a structure to be built. And the creation of the plans for that structure, as well as sourcing the building materials and the tools you’ll need to build it, has also fallen to you.

Lucky for you, this book is your blueprint.

To continue reading, order your copy of From Solo to Scaled!

Five new Future Practice webinars scheduled!

Now that we have two successful webinars (on mental models and web form design) under our belts, we’re pushing forward with a monthly series for 2009 with our partners, Smart Experience. We’ve lined up five fantastic presenters—Christian Rohrer (who’s up first, this January 29), Bill Scott, Kristina Halvorson, Ginny Redish, and John Ferrara—and more are on the way.
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All quiet?

As part of our “eating one’s own dog food” regimen, we’ve tried to proceed with building a publishing house from scratch at a careful (if occasionally pokey) pace, drawing upon many UX people and practices along the way. Not surprisingly, our announcements blog has been quiet these past few months.

Yet we’re actually quite pleased with the slow-but-steady progress; here’s a sampler of what’s cooking in the Rosenfeld Media kitchen:

• Three books are signed and underway; please visit their respective sites and participate in developing their content. Books no longer have to be an author’s monologue; these book sites are where author-reader dialogues can happen.
• We’re negotiating some exciting new titles with other potential authors. Speaking of which, are you pining to write the next great UX book? Visit our Writing for Us page to learn how to submit a proposal.
• Our print books’ interior research and design are now complete, and user testing will take place this winter. Yes, you read it right: we’ll actually test our books’ design. We’re also hard at work designing how the PDF versions of our books will look and work.
• A new service—something of a vertical mashup of UX people, books, and ideas—is finally nearing completion. If it succeeds, it’ll be a fantastic boon to the UX community. If not… well, it’ll have been a noble effort. Either way, we can’t wait to show it off, and hope you’ll participate.

That’s it for now; as always, we welcome your thoughts, advice, and encouragement.

Horton and Quesenbery to tackle Web Accessibility

Accessibility is one of those issues that seems to lurk in the back of many a designer’s mind. Can’t ignore it, especially as it becomes an increasingly frightening Legal Thing. But don’t want to deal with it; after all, it’ll screw up the design, right?

Not right. You can have a design that’s both accessible and enjoyable if you follow universal design principles. That’s what Universal Design for Web Accessibility: Solutions for barrier-free user experiences, the newest Rosenfeld Media book-in-progress, will teach you. Written by Sarah Horton, co-author of the Web Style Guide, and Whitney Quesenbery, co-author of our own Storytelling for User Experience, Universal Design for Web Accessibility will provide you with the practical principles and examples you’ll need to create sites that everyone can use.

We’re thrilled to be working with Sarah and, for a second time, Whitney. And we’re looking forward to their book coming out in 2012, a year which promises a lot of new Rosenfeld Media titles.

UX Zeitgeist: open for business

Over the past year or two, we’ve been working on a new service for the user experience, and it’s now ready for you to use and, more importantly, participate in. It’s called UX Zeitgeist, and our goal is to profile the books that the UX community uses, and the books that they want to see published.

All it takes is getting a lot of people in the UX community to answer three simple questions. We take your answers and aggregate them with information from a host of other UX-related sites. The results include some potentially wonderful benefits, ranging from a communally-developed and ranked library of UX books, an index of UX topics that the community is wondering about, and information on UX people that’s useful for research and egosurfing alike. You can track all sorts of information by charts that show trends, and there are RSS feeds galore.

Want to try it out? Please do; it’s free. Want to participate? Let us know; it should only take you a few minutes. Want to learn more? Watch the video on YouTube (it’s short: 5:44) or right here.

2010 in 46 surveys: too many

I take a lot of screenshots: web sites in general, forms specifically, and of course surveys. Those specific to a project go into particular folders; the rest are filed by year.

Today I was hunting through for inspiration for the chapter I’m working on, and got tired of flicking past non-survey things. So I moved all the surveys ones into a separate folder, and then thought: well, how many surveys are there anyway?

Now, I obviously I do a lot of surveys for professional reasons. I’m a member of one of the internet panels, just to see what they’re like. I’m working with a market research client on the user experience of their surveys. I’ve been creating a few examples of my own, and my husband has been investigating what you can get for free in a few survey tools. And if a friendly person asks me to advise informally on a survey for a volunteer or professional group, chances are that I will. So I discounted them.

That left 46 surveys that I actually completed in 2010.

Nearly one a week.

I’m sure I’m far more willing than most people to have a go at a survey, because I’m collecting materials for this book. If I possibly can, I’ll do them, but even then I’d say that I’m only able to do about a third of those that I’m asked to do. Just too busy.

Can it really be true that I’m getting around 3 survey invitations each week?

During March, I’ll try to record every invitation as well as the completions.

But maybe there’s a clue here about the general decline in response rates: there are just way too many of them.

Now on sale: A Web for Everyone

650 million, or 10% of humanity. That’s the UN’s estimate about how many people have a disability of some kind. Yet many sites simply don’t work for these users.

That’s why we’ve just released A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences, by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. It will help you get your arms around an issue that may already be nagging away in the back of your mind. And you may be pleasantly surprised to find that design and accessibility aren’t a zero sum game.

Dana Chisnell puts it best: she says that A Web for Everyone “changes the discussion from how to meet accessibility requirements to thinking of accessibility as a driver for innovation and exellent user experience design.”

Have a gander at the table of contents, its FAQ, an excerpt, Aaron Gustafson’s foreword, and testimonials from Steve Krug, Karen McGrane, and other smart people. Then please consider picking up a copy—from us (your purchase will include 4 DRM-free formats: ePUB, MOBI, PDF, and DAISY), or from Amazon.