One of the more frustrating challenges that I come up
against in experience design (customer, user, or game experiences) is that experiences work best
when they are customized for each user. But
users don’t like to fill out long profile questionnaires, even to help themselves get better
service. They take up time, feel like a violation of privacy, and lose some of the mystique of the experience (e.g. in games). Ideally, we would know much
more than the demographics that you can mine from their profiles,
registrations, or gradually build up over time and can be accessed from the major ad-serving companies (yes, most companies do this whether you realize it or not).
We would like to know their current situation: their motivation level,
their emotional state, their interest in the process. But that would mean constantly hassling each
user with a series of questionnaires each time he or she starts a new session. This is simply not feasible.
What’s a designer to do?
Another frustration for me, this one as a user, is the constant stream of quizzes
on my social media feeds. You know the
ones I mean. What Disney character are
you? What 80s sitcom are you? What 90s grunge band are you? What US President are you? What flavor of soup are you? Do enough people fill these out to justify
the cost of developing and launching them (and paying Facebook to
appear?)? Apparently so. And also apparently, my friends are prime customers because that is why they appear on my feed. Ugh.
My Take
Why do I bring these two seemingly disparate topics together
today? I have an idea that I would like
to run by you to see what you think.
What if we modify these polls to find out “What Disney character do you
feel like right now?” or “What 80s
sitcom are you right now?” Then we
modify the questions to be subtly transformed versions of validated
questionnaires designed to measure the user’s current emotional state or
motivation level.
For example, take life trackers. Each time a user logs in, he
gets some fun quizzes to fill out. They
can be optional and placed in banners like we see on many web sites today. But the answers get added to the logs from
their fitness watch and eating journal.
We now have a big picture model of how this user’s motivation level and
emotional state vary over time and we can correlate it with other
activities. How does it change when he
is exercising, waiting in line at the grocery store, working at his desk,
hanging out with particular friends or family members, or driving in rush hour
traffic (well, not this last one – no texting and driving!!!)?
The models we could develop from this would be tremendously
valuable wouldn’t they? The user would
get a much more powerful picture of his life.
The life tracker could offer more targeted ways to improve his health or
his work motivation. Companies could
benefit by offering products or services that have a better chance of helping the user out and
converting a customer for life.
Your Turn
Am I on to something here?
If you are one of those people who loves filling out these surveys,
wouldn’t it be better if you got a tangible benefit from the answers? If you don’t fill these out, would you start if the
results provided some real value?
