Projects drive change. Time to talk.
A partner insisted today that we should not use the NPS question when surveying newcomers to a website. He argued that customers should have experienced enough of what the business has to offer to know whether they would recommend the service to a friend.
My first reaction was “Do people really think that way?”
The human beings that we call “users” have values, shared opinions and beliefs that date back four thousand years (yes, your moral standings originate in and are associated with the beginning of many world literatures, such as the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh). These human constructs direct our actions and attitudes and, when we visit a website they shape what we call the “user experience”.
The fact is, users will not take the time to see what your website offers in the same manner that they would not take the time to meet a person well enough to decide whether they like them or not. Blame biology for that.
I have to admit, not everyone is too quick to make judgments about other people. But when we ask them how satisfied they are after a visit to our website, the least we can do is raise questions of relevance.
Come to think of it, a person would never ask the question “On a scale of 0 to ten, would you recommend me…” to another person to find out if he/she is likable. Why do we trust that people would feel comfortable to answer the NPS question?
The NPS question might just as well be a thing of the past, just like door-to-door sales. An “antique” question.
Researchers have been de-constructing expectation, emotional reaction, knowledge and post adoption experience for decades. Having established the constructs of trust, numerous trust models explain the trusting decision (ultimately whether I will “recommend” your website and to what degree).
Have a look at the theoretical perspectives that enconpass a question such as the NPS or any other question/scale measuring the so-called “user satisfaction”:
- Personality theory, conceptualizing trust as a belief, expectancy.
- Sociology and economics, conceptualizing trust mainly as a phenomenon within and between institutions, and as the trust individuals put in those institutions.
- Social psychology, characterizing trust in terms of the expectations and willingness of the trusting party in a transaction, the risks associated with acting on such expectations, and the contextual factors that either enhance or inhibit the development and mainte-nance of that trust.
You may also add benevolence, loyalty, aesthetic and honesty as interacting determinants of emotional reaction. The latter implies the catalytic influence of emotions (e.g., feelings of security and comfort) on value-added post adoption use (Mcknight et al. 2006).
Yes, there’s a Handbook of trust research. Who knew? :)
Coming back to “how people think”, the deeply held internal images of how things work, or “mental models” as we joyfully call them in UX, are not “user only”.
The people writing the surveys have tons of mental models, especially when it comes to research: We tend to merely automate most of our activities. The NPS does not need to change. Don’t expect a door-to-door salesman to be willing to change his/her sales script.
The fact is, we do not have to think like the door-to-door salesmen anymore. We can modify the business objectives, reshape the organizational structure and reengineer business processes — Yes we can.
Any research is a research project and projects drive change.
Projects drive change — Projects influence an organization’s ongoing operations and business strategies.
Cultural change can even be an incidental effect of a project, a necessary ingredient for success, or even a deliverable.
I was studying the PMBOK today and somehow it got into me. They say that natural-born managers will scrap the plan and embrace change. I’m embracing the PMBOK for now. :)
