What’s wrong with this picture? It always surprises me when major sites with huge traffic and stable of full-time developers have features that are fundamentally broken. Check out this screenshot from Bizrate.com (click picture to see full sized image)

How many characters left?

What’s wrong?

1. It only gives me 255 characters. This is probably because they have chosen to store the text in a fixed-length database field for rapid retrieval. That’s what happens when the usability people and the marketing people get overrruled by some engineer who thinks that this minor efficiency improvement is sufficient reason to cripple the interface.
2. It doesn’t tell me anywhere how many characters I’m allowed. It wasn’t until I submitted my original version that it rejected it and came back and told me there was a 255 character limit.
3. It has no running count of characters used. This has become a standard feature everywhere else. We’re used to it on Twitter and most places that have low character limitations.

So what? Well, it took me three tries to get my feedback accepted. And by the time I did, the glowing testimonial I had for the merchant was gone. No room left.

All the merchant got out of this was my comment that I think they should make their free shipping offer appear more prominently on the page.

What the merchant did not get was my comment that when I factored in free shipping, their price was significantly better than the competitor’s price.

Okay, I just placed the order, so I can’t comment on speed of delivery and all that, but I would say that the shopping experience on US-Mattress.com was close to ideal. It’s easy to navigate, there are no real surprises (except why did they offer to let me upgrade to “standard front door” delivery for $49? What is the delivery I’m getting for free?).

Anyway, the bad part is that I agreed to do the Bizrate survey because I like to reward e-commerce merchants who do it “right”. I arrived at the survey with a good feeling, wanting to leave a great testimonial. But the frustrations of using Bizrate’s system left me feeling, well… frustrated. Of course, I don’t hold US-Mattress responsible, at least not consciously, but that’s the thing about usability problems — often they operate on a sub-conscious level. The good feeling I had upon completing the purchase is now forever associated with the stupid Bizrate survey.

And then, there’s Bizrate’s enticements to get you to take the survey, promising all sorts of free stuff. Obviously, everyone who spends a lot of time on the net knows by now that these are not “rewards”, but affiliate offers from which Bizrate makes additional income, but that’s a whole other story.

I just loved the service on keyword airlines!

Source: Skymall catalog on a recent Delta flight.

I’m sure this testimonial is 100% legitimate. I mean, your typical loving family peppers their speech with “keyword” when they can’t think of the exact word, right? And a company would never reuse a testimonial would they? Of course not!

I was really bored, so I picked up the in-flight gadget catalog and they had this ad for the coolest keyword ever! The family in the testimonial for the keyword made it sound so good, I just had to have one!

A friend recently asked me to test Aardvark (vark.com) advice network (not to be confused with the amazing Firefox Aardvark extension, the developer’s best friend). Essentially, you upload all sorts of information about yourself, your knowledge and interests, and somehow it connects you with friends of friends. When they have a question, it sends you an email, chat or SMS message. It may be that I’m just simply not in their target audience, so some of my thoughts may be off base, but I do think that vark.com is missing the boat on some of the basic prerequisites for a social netoworking site. They say they do a lot of user testing, so they must have tested all this, but it seems like there’s a lot of testing yet to be done.

The Audience Problem

Like I say, not sure how much my thoughts are worth, since clearly they’re aiming at another audience. As in: I don’t do chat, IM, text messaging or any of that. I have long since trained my friends that I don’t often answer emails the same day I receive them (and long before I heard of Tim Ferris). The only immediate response thing I do is phone and skype and I only give my skype address out to family and a few friends and try to limit that. So it’s a bit hard for me to see how I would participate in Aardvark.

Conceptual level. The Big Idea level….

Here’s where they fail to make the sale to me and once they fail to make this sale, it’s an uphill battle for them to build trust through the rest of the process. The thing that is difficult for me to get around is that in my view there are personal and impersonal channels of communication.

• Personal: email, chat, skype, Facebook personal messaging, Twitter direct messagings. These are all messages from someone to me specifically and nobody else.
• Impersonal: Twitter posts, forums, Facebook wall, etc. These are messages that go from someone to the wide wide world. They’re not to me personally and uniquely.

I try to keep my personal channels free from impersonal messages. I have spamcatcher email addresses I use for things that blur the line, such as newsletters, mailing lists, signing up for accounts with BestBuy, Amazon and such. It strikes me that Aardvark is trying to use a personal channel (chat, email) to deliver an impersonal message. Yes, it is personalized — I only get messages that are supposed to be appropriate to me — but not personal, that is only to me. So that’s an adoption hurdle for me just as a concept.

The Registration Problem

They could overcome the personal/impersonal problem by using the registration process to allay fears and make the sale, but in my opinion, they do the opposite. Aardvark actually asks for quite a bit of information just to get started. I’m always skeptical of that and if I’m going to give away a lot of personal information about where I live and what I like, information that marketers will kill for (or worse yet, pay for). To give away all that information, it needs to meet one of two conditions, and preferably both:

• I need it. I may be a little uneasy about a site, but they have something that I absolutely need. I can’t do without it or I don’t want to do without it. They’re asking for personal details, but they’re offering something of great value.
• I trust them. There are a few sites that I trust implicitly with my information. I don’t give Amazon more than I have to, and they have only my spam catcher email address, but over the years they’ve built up great trust by not abusing my information. Often not-for-profits ask me to trust them because they have a great mission and are inherently good. Just like the government, if you catch my meaning. And if you don’t, that is to say that the government has been a poor steward of my privacy lately.

Typically, when I sign up for a new service that I don’t necessarily trust, I start by giving a spam catcher address and often a fake name (and almost always a fake birth date). If they want personally identifiable information,they need to build my trust either before, during or after the registration process.

I actually went all the way through the Aardvark registration process because I was asked by a friend to test it. I found it much too intrusive for a site that I had never heard of and knew little about. They have detailed information on how it works in theory, but nothing at all on what happens with my data, who can see it, and what control I would have over contact from people I know and don’t know.

An example

And then there are parts that I didn’t do anyway, even if invited by my friend…. Example: in general, I block all Facebook apps. I find all those snowballs fights, mafia, pirate stuff absurd and just a distraction to keeping in touch with family and friends. And I don’t collect Facebook friends. I try to keep it a personal channel as much as possible. If you we don’t have personal history together, you’re not on my Facebook list. When Aardvark offers to connect to Facebook, it’s still not clear to me exactly what’s going to happen, how it’s going to show up on Facebook, what my friends will see, and what exactly my benefit is. Ideally, exactly next to the Facebook connect button there should be a "what’s this?" or "how this works" link to a video that shows how it shows up in Facebook, what my friends will see, what benefits it offers and what hassles, if any, it imposes on my life. For me Facebook is a semi-personal channel and and I don’t want to annoy my friends and family that I keep in touch with via Facebook. Before I connect other data, I need to know that it won’t annoy my friends or affect my reputation.

A Broken Interface Erodes Trust

If I start setup, I can’t get to the welcome/home page any more or at least I couldn’t figure out how. It always brings me to the last spot I was in during setup like a pitbull that won’t let go. Clicking on the Aardvark at the top should always take me to the home page (a web interface standard that must not be broken), but it took me to the Facebook Connect page. So I’m not on Facebook (though I am) and it took me to the Add Categories page. But do I want to add categories? Again, are my categories and demographic info being shared with marketers? This type of behavior once again erodes trust. It makes the user feel trapped.

A recommendation

Think about every possible hesitation and catch me exactly at my hesitation point, like the suggestion to have an explanation about effects on privacy and such right next to the Facebook Connect button. I know of marketers who say they get much higher conversions when they have a popup link to their privacy policy right on the registration or order form, for example. That would help a lot.

Aardvark needs to think a bit more about the registration process if they want easy adoption beyond social networking true believers: what trust and social proof barriers might people perceive, figure out what the choke points are by keeping track of exactly where people abandon the process, figure out why, and take steps to fix it.

Online, trust is everything. In person, we have the idea that if something goes truly bad, we can go down to the business or local animal shelter or whatever and picket, protest, call the police, walk in with a lawyer. It doesn’t mean I trust those businesses. They often ask for a phone number at transaction time and I simply say no. But I do have the assurance that I can come down and find these people.

Trust is harder to build online and must be cultivated carefully and persistently at every possible occasion. There is no such thing as paying to much attention to building trust, and Aardvark needs to pay more attention.

The title pretty much says it. Paypal Buyer Protection will not help you if you have a problem and need to dispute a purchase on EBay. Simple as that.

I was looking to buy a copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition. I looked at my favorite places: Tiger Direct, Amazon, BestBuy and decided to have a look at EBay, though I’m always a little leery of EBay. It had what looked like a legitimate copy from a legitimate seller. It was a UK seller, with almost 500 sales and over a 98% positive rating. The description said the item was a retail copy, not OEM, which was important to me because the retail version can be legally installed on three machines, but the OEM version is only for one machine. Everything looked good, but I was still skeptical. Finally, one thing tipped the balance: it was guaranteed by Paypal Buyer Protection. I’m a fan of Paypal, so it seemed like a good bet.

A day later, I got notification that my software had shipped. The email was funny — several characters that wouldn’t render. Uh oh. So I clicked the tracking info and it was shipping from Shanghai! Okay, could be a drop shipper, but it wasn’t looking good. I logged into my EBay account and all trace of the purchase had been wiped clean. The seller account was gone. All information about my purchase was gone. Double uh oh.

So I call EBay. They can’t help because the seller has been kicked out and they won’t arbitrate at this point. They tell me I will have to wait until the item arrives and then take it up with Paypal if there’s a problem.

The item arrives and it’s a recordable DVD with a handwritten product code on it. I call Paypal and they will not cover it until I return it. I’m livid. This person is an obvious criminal without a let to stand on. If I had put it on my credit card, I would cancel my charge and end of story. With Paypal, not only do I need to return the item, I need to return it with tracking. As it turns out, the cheapest way of tracking the item will only track it out of the US, but not to the seller’s door. To do that, I would need to spend more than the cost of a the software at Amazon.

Alas, it’s a sunk costs question. No way to recoup my money. So I went back to Amazon and bought it there. Brand new, retail version, three licesnes that validated with Microsoft. Only about $5 more than the Chinese ripoff artist.

Lessons learned:

• Never buy software on EBay. There’s just no way to tell unless it’s a merchant you know.
• Avoid Paypal for online purchases and use a real credit card with reasonable dispute policies
• Scammers are making brands more powerful and making it hard for small merchants to make a living on the web.

This is the third part of the series on Weapons of Influence, based on Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, Part 1 discussed the principle of reciprocation; Part 2 covered the principle of commitment and consistency.

Social Proof

Birds of a feather, flock together. Or so we’ve been told. In other words, we like to be around people like us and we like to be like them. We also look to others for cues as to how to act. This explains a famous incident in New York where 38 witnesses heard a woman’s scream for help and did nothing. The failure of others to respond is a clue to us that the situation is not serious, we don’t need to respond either. Unfortunately, that cue, often reliable, cost the woman her life in this case. It turns out that you’re much better off if one person sees you being attacked or sees smoke coming from under a door than if a crowd of people do. If you do find yourself in a bad situation and there’s a crowd, use the word "help", look someone in the eye, point at that person and say "You, sir, in the red shirt, please help." General pleas to a crowd tend to go unanswered until one person responds, then the social proof works in the other direction and others will jump in to help.

The effects of social proof go beyond what I would have guessed. For example, in the months after a highly publicized suicide, the rate of airplane and automobile fatalities goes up significantly. This has been observed over long periods in large numbers and with numerous controls. Furthermore, if it’s a murder-suicide, it is more likely for multi-passenger airplane and multiple vehicle automobile fatalities to occur. If it’s a simple suicide, it correlated with single-victim crashes. After adding in numerous controls to the data, researchers were forced to conclude that these increased crashes were secret suicides. In a similar vein, after a heavyweight boxing championship bout, murder rates briefly rise around the country.

Back to how this is typically employed specifically to influence you, Cialdini looks at laugh tracks. Everyone polled says he or she hates canned laughter soundtracks on television shows. And yet, research shows that even though the canned laughter is obviously fake and we say we hate it, we find shows funnier if they include a laugh track because our subconscious mind can’t escape the fact that "others" are laughing so it must be funny. Similarly testimonials, even when it is obviously not a "natural" unsolicited testimonial, influences our decision to buy (and someday I have to tell the story of the Hansen’s soda lady trying to elicit a testimonial from me. I didn’t end up famous).

There are some crazy variations on the influence of social proof. For example, in a study by Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Polytechnic University, the researchers created two conditions: one where people heard several people express a given opinion once each and one where one person expressed an opinion several times. It turns out, that in both cases, respondents judged opinions to be popular based on the number of times they had heard the opinion, but did not adjust for the fact that in some cases it was actually an opinion expressed repeatedly by one person [1]. So strangely, we sometimes perceive social proof when what we’re really seeing is one persistent loudmouth. That’s a good lesson if you really want to get something done in your community, but it’s not so good if someone just has a big enough budget to broadcast that message at you 12 times per day.

How to Say No. First, remind yourself that the testimonial you’re seeing is quite possibly faked. Large numbers of review sites on the web are laden with fake reviews. If you don’t have a reason to trust the testimonial, don’t. Second, don’t assume that if a lot of people are doing something, they must have information that you don’t (that’s not a person in a diabetic coma who needs help, but a drunk sleeping it off in the gutter). I must say, I don’t think Cialdini has read Kierkegaard, because he grappled with this question over 150 years ago with his famous ruminations on Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, knowing that this was a solitary and unjustifiable act. Kierkegaard believed that only "the crowd" could have executed Christ and that if each person had had to face Christ alone, one at a time, he would never have been crucified. Kierkegaard argued that truth is subjectivity, not objectivity and that when you side with the crowd, you cannot know if your decisions are moral
or true. It doesn’t make them immoral, it’s just that you don’t know. So Kierkegaard’s philosophy implies a simple question: what would I do if I had to make this decision with nobody else around? What would I do if everyone else were doing the opposite of what they are doing now? In other words, if everyone wanted to honor Christ, would I still vote to crucify? If everyone was rushing around in a panic because there was smoke coming from under a door, would I calmly walk past? Are my actions conditioned by the crowd, or by my sense of what I should do in this situation? I think Cialdini finds it impractical to pose such questions every minute of the day and that may be why he doesn’t invoke Kierkegaard. I cite Kierkegaard because I like to pretend I’ve actually read Kierkegaard instead of just heard about him on Jeopardy. Don’t tell Alex Trebeck.

[1]"Everyone Agrees", but Melinda Warner, Scientific American Mind, Aug/Sept 2007 (vol. 18, no. 4), p. 13.

This is the second part of the series on Weapons of Influence, based on Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, Part 1 discussed the principle of reciprocation.

Commitment and Consistency

We like to be consistent and honor our commitments. As with reciprocity, under normal social circumstances, these are good traits, but they can be used against us. The famous experiment in this vein was the one where a research accomplice goes to the beach, lays down a blanket and puts out some personal items, including a radio. The accomplice then goes away. A few minutes later, another accomplice comes up and "steals" the radio. The experiment varies between two conditions. In one condition, the original accomplice gets up and leaves without saying anything. In the other condition, that orginal person specifically asks someone to watch his or her stuff. In the first case, four in twenty times the second accomplice could "steal" the radio without challenge. In the second condition, the "thief" was stopped and challenged nineteen out of twenty times. So the challenge rate went from 20% to 95% (p. 59). In other words, people had an overwhelming desire to be consistent with
their prior commitment.

These techniques can be remarkably subtle. For example, when a telemarketer calls it makes a huge difference whether that person says "How are you feeling tonight?" and gets an answer or says "I hope you’re feeling well tonight". The difference is that in the first case, the target has committed publicly to having a good evening (because the response is typically Fine, thanks"). Having publicly committed to doing "fine", it is very hard for the target to shirk on giving money to the earthquake victims in wherever who are so unfine and so in need of help. In the case where the caller simply says "I hope you’re feeling well this evening" no such commitment was extracted and the response rate was less than half (15 vs 33 percent) what it was when the caller asks a question.

Or how about this one. Toy companies advertise items in the runup to Christmas that they have no intention of stocking in sufficient numbers to meet demand. The unwitting parent commits to the present for the pleading child. Since the gift isn’t available, dad buys something of equivalent value for Christmas. But two months later, well there’s that item miraculously on sale. Dad goes and buys it because he feels a commitment to his kid. The toy companies know this and use this technique to prop up sales in January and February.

Companies use essay contests to make you feel good about them. Something as simple as copying out a message in your own handwriting can make you want to follow through on all the nice things you’ve said about that company. Public utilities have gotten people to save lots of energy simply by getting people to commit to saving energy.

It turns out that internalizing the commitment is key. When utilities hold a contest and say that those who save a certain amount of energy will be recognized, people do cut down on energy usage. But when they then call to renege and say the contest is cancelled, it turns out that energy usage falls even further. It seems that this is because people are actually less motivated when they feel they’re doing it for external reasons, and more motivated when they feel they are doing it for themselves. Being the kind of person who likes to be energy efficient is more powerful than being the kind of person who will reduce electricity usage in order to save $5.

There’s one further usage of the commitment and consistency principle that is worth noting. I’ve been taken in by subtler forms of this on many occasions. It’s called the lowball. Essentially, your sleazy used car salesman offers you a price that he knows he can’t really honor. You agree. When it comes time to sign the final papers, the accounting department finds an arithematic "error" or the sales manager notes an "error" in the trade-in value and the salesman sheepishly fesses up to his "mistake". But here’s the thing, you’ve committed to buying the car, and at this point it’s psychologically hard to turn that around, and you buy it anyway, rather than going down the street to where they have it for real at the initial price the salesman offered. The subtler version that takes me in is deciding to buy something that’s on sale. But then I drag my feet and miss the sale. Two months later, I miraculously own it anyway.

How to Say No. When we get caught in these situations, we typically know in our gut that we’ve been had. If the spidey sense starts tingling, ask yourself a simple question: "Knowing what I know now, would I make the same decision as if I had not committed myself?" So in other words, ask yourself, "If I had not shaken the hand of the sleazy used car salesman on the deal, would I buy the car at this price?" "If I had never seen that Marmot Precip jacket on sale, would I still be buying it today at full price?" The key here is to focus in on how you feel in the microsecond after you pose the question, before the rationalizations kick in. That is when you’re most honest with yourself or, as Cialdini says (p. 110): "Accumulating psychological evidence indicates that we experience our feelings toward something a split second before we can intellectualize it."

The cover of Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is adorned with a quote that says "For marketers, this book is among the most important books written in the last ten years." That’s probably true, but it’s a little troubling that there is no quote that says "For consumers, this book is among the most important books written in the last then years." In many ways, Cialdini is writing for consumers, not marketers. Each chapter discusses a "weapon of influence", the way it is used against us and finish with a subsection called "How to Say No" (to this particular "weapon of influence"). I think every reader will recognize each weapon, will feel that you already know that is used against you, and will eventually think of a situation where, even with that knowledge, you got sucked in.

Read how we get sucked into reciprocal relationships unknowingly » »

I love Smartwool. I’m actually wearing a Smartwool shirt and Smartwool socks right now. If Smartwool wanted me to write a testimonial, all they would have to do is ask, to say “Hey, we want some killer testimonials for our website, will you help us out?” That’s not what they did.
Read more on the problem with mixing social norms and market norms » »

No, that title isn’t a typo. It’s a sarcastic comment on the “genius” of the login screen for the iTunes Genius feature which, as it turns out, is the same as the iTunes store login. It took me four tries to figure out how to log in. Not so Genius. Read on » »

Every once in a while I file a support issue with some service I use. The customer service rep confidently replies with an answer. The last one, at a place I won’t name, suggested that I clear my browser cache. Of course, I had done that, multiple times on multiple browsers. That’s fine though. That response probably works most of the time. But here’s the thing: he then marked my ticket as “Closed”, problem solved. This is the second time in a couple of months that I’ve had to deal with a business who operates this way.
How I *want* to be treated -» »