Searching Help: Don’t Even Go There

Creating a Comprehensive User Assistance Strategy

To put all of your Web site user assistance content into action, you need a comprehensive experience strategy. A good user assistance strategy has four goals, as follows:

1. Manage expectations.
2. Show that you care.
3. Strive for an easy Help experience.
4. Finish on a positive note.

Next, let’s discuss the four goals of a user assistance strategy in more detail.

Manage Expectations

B.J. Fogg popularized the notion that computers can change people’s thoughts and behaviors in predictable ways. One of the critical functions of a user assistance system is managing the strong emotions that arise when customers have unfulfilled expectations after interacting with an application. That’s why, when designing Help content, managing expectations should be a top concern. Expectations affect user emotions such as delight or frustration, and strong emotions translate directly into brand perception and brand equity. Unfulfilled expectations cause strong negative emotions and damage customer perception of your brand—often in ways that you cannot rectify later, because customers are unwilling to give you another chance. The good news is that Help is exactly the feature in which small delights can quickly add up to a very positive overall experience.

As shown in Figure 10, Overstock expertly manages expectations on their Contact Us page. The page clearly communicates that the waiting time for live chat is less than 2 minutes; for email support, less than 1 business day; and phone hold time is only 1–2 minutes.

A general strategy for managing expectations is as follows:

1. Set low expectations for a process, in terms of its cost/benefit ratio.
2. Work hard to exceed expectations and delight your customers.
3. Cry just once. If you must disappoint your customers, do it in one big blow, then move on.
4. Delight customers often, in many small ways.
5. Delight customers in ways that never get old—for example, through your competence.

As for the zero search results pages I described in my first Search Matters column, it is important to treat Help not as a fatal breakdown in communication between your site and your users, but as an opportunity to exceed expectations and delight your customers.

Show That You Care

Human beings are social animals who want to feel someone cares about them. In the context of providing Help, caring means:

• providing the right assistance in the right place at the right time
• using the level of explanation that is appropriate to the task
• never forcing customers to learn, but instead providing straight-forward, clear answers with lots of options to learn more
• providing information that is appropriate to the knowledge level of a customer
• never making people feel stupid by giving them the wrong answer, providing circuitous navigation, or offering unclear explanations.

If people feel that you care, they automatically trust that a Help system is suggesting what’s best for them and don’t scrutinize its content as much. In other words, the feeling that someone cares reduces people’s need to think about the quality of an answer. People generally prefer to trust information rather than having to think, because thinking can be hard work and takes energy.

Sometimes a company’s biggest problem can be the perception that it has grown so large that it no longer cares about individual customers. This perception can incite furious responses to even the smallest of infractions. Some big companies go to great lengths to show they do in fact care, but few manage to come across as sincere. Figure 11 shows the Travelocity Bill of Rights along with its signature gnome character.

Because Travelocity has made caring for customers an integral part of their brand, customers generally perceive its Bill of Rights as a sign of genuine caring, so it gets a positive response from most customers.

Strive for an Easy Help Experience

When customers say That was easy after using Help, their evaluation encompasses both their expectations and their satisfaction with the Help system’s performance. We suspect that’s why Staples has made this phrase their slogan. To ensure customers feel getting help was easy, you have to do both of the following:

• Set the right expectations at the start—never overpromise!
• Ensure customers feel like they’re making progress toward a solution with each thing they do.

The path to resolve a problem can take hours and still seem easy, as long as people expect the path to be long and don’t ever feel confused or stuck along the way. Part of making a long process feel easy has to do with the feeling of flow Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularized. The Travelocity user assistance, shown in Figure 12, does a good job of maintaining a sense of flow by providing both Related Answers and Previously Viewed Answers.

A Help system can maintain good task flow by providing a clear path for a customer to follow, as well as lots of relevant links, ensuring the delivery of a complete solution to the customer’s issue.

Finish on a Positive Note

In user assistance, designers should do everything possible to provide a positive finish, even if it means taking a phone call—Horrors!—or offering a free gift. Finishing on a positive note is especially important for user assistance experiences that started with a strongly negative event like a stolen credit card, a broken item, or delayed shipping. Strong negative emotions directly affect customers’ brand perception. However, a weak negative finish has no effect on your brand perception, unless it happens again and again.

One of the ways you can finish on a positive note is to let customers provide feedback once the Help system presents an answer. In addition to showing a company cares, feedback lets the Help system dynamically choose what content to show next and shows where you need to expand your content to benefit your other customers.

Unfortunately, few companies ask customers for feedback effectively. Figure 13 shows a particularly cumbersome example of a feedback form for the Sun J2EE tutorial.

How many busy people would navigate to another page and take the time to fill out this long form? The form asks users to select a chapter. Do users have to fill out this form multiple times to provide feedback on different chapters? Who would know better what version of the tutorial a user is reviewing—the company or the customer? While this form feels like a typical, long form for contacting customer support, it includes this disclaimer: “We do not respond to everyone.” This kind of long form is not a good way to ask your customers for some quick feedback, and it does not, therefore, provide a positive finish.

In contrast to the Sun tutorial, the most effective user assistance feedback is

• contextual—It provides the ability for a customer to give feedback on every chapter and every solution page when viewing it and does not require them to navigate to another page to give feedback.
• immediate—It does not ask customers for their name or email address or require them to sign in. If you force customers to register, most people will provide fake or disposable credentials to avoid receiving spam. Often, a Help system can readily capture a customer’s identity from a cookie, so there is no need for customers to identify themselves.
• simple—One simple, but effective method of providing feedback is tagging, which is sadly underutilized in Help systems. Tagging is both powerful and versatile. Tags can describe quality (“good”), topic (“tutorial”), keywords (“J2EE”), and much more. You can aggregate tags in tag clouds or lists and use them to enhance keyword search for your Help system.

Putting It All Together

User assistance that consistently exceeds customers’ expectations can catapult your company to the status of industry leader and greatly increase your brand equity. However, designing a great Help system is no easy task.

To design an optimal user assistance experience, it is important to think holistically about all of the touchpoints along the way. To serve the right Help at the right time, it helps to classify Help content along three separate attributes: immediacy, depth of knowledge, and touch. Web site user assistance involves a multipronged approach that includes inline Help, a single Help landing page, and browsable navigation, while keeping a clear focus on providing a complete solution for your customers.

To orchestrate a compelling user experience, think about how delivering user assistance is like a creating story, a film, or a motivational talk. A Help system needs to manage expectations, maintain task flow, and demonstrate that a company genuinely cares about its customers. It helps to think of a user assistance experience as an emotional journey—delighting people in small ways as the journey progresses and finishing on a strong positive note. Understanding and using the power of emotions to create a compelling, positive brand experience should be the primary goal behind a Help system. 

Bibliography

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. London: HarperCollins, 1992.

Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.

Fogg, B.J. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.

Friedman, Batya. Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Miller, Christopher A., Editor. “Human-Computer Etiquette: Managing Expectations with Intentional Agents.” Communications of the ACM, 47(4), 31-61, 2004.

Norman, Donald A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Nudelman, Greg. “Starting from Zero: Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages.” UXmatters, February 9, 2009. Retrieved March 25, 2009.

Picard, Rosalind W. Affective Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

Smith, Gene. Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. Berkeley: Peachpit Press, 2008.

Wroblewski, Luke. Web Form Design: Filling In the Blanks. New York: Rosenfeld Media, 2008.