What Makes Them Click

Have a habit that you want to change? Or maybe you are trying to change the behavior of people at work? Or you want to change the behavior of people coming to your blog or website? If you read any of the research on habits you will find that habits are hard to change. (I’ll do a separate post on that shortly). You can change habits, but it takes a lot of work. Or maybe not?

Have you seen the video on the musical stairs? Many of you probably have. If so, watch it again before reading on, and if you haven’t then you’ll enjoy it. I believe that there are some lessons about habit change in the video:

Shortcuts to changing habits — I’ve been thinking about that video and I am thinking that there might be ways to shortcut all the work it takes to change a habit, or at least jump start the process. Based on the video here are 3 ideas I’ve come up with: read more »

I was speaking today with a friend/colleague about their project to try and get people to use a support website for technical help rather than call the help desk. She asked me how they could get people to use the website instead of call in. People will call in if the help desk is really helpful. For example, I have Apple Care for my Mac. They are usually very helpful. I’ll pick up the phone and call them. But when I have a problem with my HP laptop at home, I’ll do anything to avoid calling the HP help desk (not at all helpful). I’d rather go online and search on my own. But then comes the next interesting question. Which is better? the vendor tech support site or searching on google? Definitely searching on google! Support self-service works well when the user can direct the search… they can refine the search parameters and when the search results have enough detail so the user can see if they will be useful, including telling a story.

Recently I searched for a problem I was having with Powerpoint on my Mac. Entering my search query into Google, I quickly found someone who wrote a story that sounded just like my story. Sure enough, when I looked for more details I discovered they were having the same problem, and they wrote back in with the solution!

Community forums seem to be the best way to get support help. Using the idea of social validation, people will often trust others more than they trust experts these days (especially true of the millennial generation). Really the model is that people are their own expert. They in fact are not searching for someone to give them an answer, they are searching for the “nugget” of information told in a story format from another person — the nugget that will give them a hint, an “a ha” moment that will result in figuring out the problem and the answer on their own. If you want to encourage self service, use community and others stories to encourage people to solve their own problems.

What do you think? Help desk or vendor support site or community forum from google? Which do you find most helpful?

In my book, Neuro Web Design: What makes them click, I have a chapter on Social Validation: When we are uncertain we look to others to see what our behavior should be.

Now some new research tests this idea online. In a series of research studies by Chen (see end for full reference), visitors to a simulated website were given two holiday traveling books to choose from. Both had similar sounding titles, were hardcover, showed similar number of pages, list price and availability.

In the first study Chen showed different consumer ratings. In some cases people saw that one book had 5 stars and the other had 1, or one had 4 and the other had 2, or both had 3 stars. The books with more stars were chosen signficantly more often. Ok, it’s not a big surprise, but it’s good to have some actual data. But read on, the rest of the studies got curiouser and curiouser…

In the second study Chen compared book sales volumes instead of star ratings. People chose the book that was selling the best.

In the third study Chen tested consumer recommendations vs. expert recommendations. One group got this info: “Name of Book Here” is the leading book in the tourism area as voted for online by readers” vs. “Our advisors, experts in the tourism area, strongly recommend “Name of Book Here”. People chose the book picked by consumers more than the book picked by experts.

And in the fourth study, Chen tested a recommender system, (“Customers who bought this book also bought”) vs. the recommendation of the website owner, (“Our Internet bookstore staff strongly recommends that you buy…”) People followed the recommendation of the website owner 75% of the time, but they followed the recommender system 88.4% of the time.

Consumer recommendations are powerful. Social validation at work. Welcome to the herd!

Reference: Chen, Yi-Fen, Herd behavior in purchasing books online, Computers in Human Behavior, 24, (2008), 1977-1992.