Design Matters; Abolish the Research Inquisition

Does design matter when it comes to using online social media? You bet. It is almost always the first point of engagement with whom you want to interact. In the pre-2.0 days people talked about the first two minutes of an initial interaction between people (or perhaps a brand) in which you had an opportunity to make an impression. With online and 2.0 it is down to just seconds.
There are a number of aspects that affect an individual’s decision to take up membership of a community and a lot can be learnt from Market Research as to how this is best done, unfortunately not always for the right reasons.
Over the next few posts I am going to articulate some of the important aspects that need to be considered when starting a community, beginning with the sign-up process.

Drop the inquisition

Last night I read a great article in ESOMAR’s Research World by Philip Garland of SSI (I would love to give you an online address to find it, but alas I have had no luck finding the article outside of their print journal at this point). Here he described the big picture problem within research of how we are mistreating respondents and that it is resulting in an unsustainable future for the industry. Whilst I do not necessarily agree with his suggested solutions I do think that he articulated the problem well, likening it to the Icelandic fishing industry of all things.

What can social media learn from this issue in traditional research? In market research we have this unhealthy obsession with ensuring that we maintain something called representation. We insist that we only speak to certain people and that asking 15+ questions to ensure that we talking to those people is perfectly acceptable (researchers could learn a lot if they read The Wisdom of Crowds).
So we may start talking to 1000 people, but by the time we have gone through all these questions only 50 people actually end up being eligible to participate in research.

It can look a bit like this:

You can see where this is going…. So not only does this put off respondents from attempting to undertake further research, but it also turns off those who did succeed in participating because they do not want to have to sit through all those qualifying questions again. They just want to get to the interesting part of the survey that actually has nothing to do with dying your design pooches hair and is all about gingivitis.

You need traction, but friction burns

In Social Media we need to eliminate this “friction” as Joshua Porter describes in his excellent presentation Designing for Social Traction. It all starts with getting potential members into the site and signing-up as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Joshua Porter

Here is a thought, would you rather have 1000 anonymous people giving you feedback, thoughts, suggestions etc or 8 people who you know a few things about? The most successful communities from the start that we have run with our clients are the ones where we only ask them for their e-mail address and a password. We can ask them more questions once they are in the site, but we need to get them in their first, build up trust and give them what they want. I have no use for members who do not participate once signed up. Unfortunately, against better advice, a few clients have found this out the hard and expensive way.

So start by getting people in quickly and painlessly.