Let me illustrate.

Quick, without Googling, what were the venues for the last 4 Summer Olympics?

If you’re like me, a neat list of 4 cities did not immediately pop into your head.  In fact, even though I’m a pretty die-hard Olympics-watching fan, my brain is struggling to remember anything before Beijing.

But what about if I asked the question in this way?

From the list below, pick the venues for the last 4 Summer Olympics:

• Seoul
• Beijing
• Los Angeles
• Montreal
• Athens
• Rio de Janeiro
• Sydney
• Tokyo
• Johannesburg
• Atlanta

Easier this time, right?  Beijing, Athens, Sydney, Atlanta.

That’s an illustration of recall vs. recognition in human memory.

Recall memory involves delving into your brain, looking for specific pieces of information, finding them, confirming that they are the information you wanted, and then putting them to use.

Recognition skips the first three steps.  You are somehow prompted with the specific pieces of information, then all you have to do is confirm that they are correct and put them to use.

In both cases, the information is stored somewhere in your brain.  If I had never heard of the Olympics, I wouldn’t be able to pick the correct cities out of a list – all of the list items would’ve been similarly meaningless to me.

Why is this important?

As you might have guessed, recall memory is harder.  It’s legitimately harder for people to answer a question that doesn’t provide any contextual prompts.

If I used your product on Monday, and you email me on Wednesday saying “Any feedback?”, I’m likely to draw a blank.  Not because I don’t care about you, not because I’m a “stupid user”, but because I’ve got no context to use to dig into my recall memory.

Recall memory is like asking your brain to do push-ups.  Some people can’t do many or any pushups; others can, but we’d rather procrastinate and get around to it later.

So how do I ask for feedback in a “brain-friendly” way?

Use recognition.

Instead of asking “what should we build next?“, ask “which of these new features [list] would be most helpful to you, and why?” (Not only is this “brain-friendly”, it’s also “product manager-friendly”, allowing you to guide their feedback in alignment with your long-term product vision.  There’s no value in letting people ask for faster horses over and over again if you’re building Model Ts.)

If you suspect a specific page is confusing, don’t ask “what about the page was confusing?”, show them a picture of the page and let them point to the confusing parts.

Give customers a sentiment and allow them to agree (or disagree) and elaborate.  For example, “some customers felt this workflow was confusing – why do you think that is?”

Use immediacy.

If you ask a question while the customer is using your site, there’s nothing to remember – they just did, or are still doing, the thing you’re asking about.

In my experience, immediacy cancels out one of the biggest complaints I hear about customer feedback: “it’s useless because it’s all extremes, 1 star or 5 stars!”   This makes perfect “brain sense” – after you’ve completed an action or experience and time has passed, your memory becomes distorted towards the elements that left you with the biggest emotional impact – whether that’s joy at a gorgeous interface, or (more likely) fury at a confusing workflow.

But while your customer is experiencing something, they’re going through a series of impressions:  Ooh, nice refresh! Hmm, I don’t understand that sentence.  Oh good, this will do exactly what I wanted.  Wait, did that charge my credit card or not?  I wish this workflow was more straightforward.  This will make my life easier.  How do I undo what I just did?  Oh no!  Oh, phew, I guess it’s okay.

Wouldn’t you rather overhear that entire stream of impressions vs. a 3-star rating or “yeah, I kind of like your site”?

Use interactivity.

It’s not always possible (and sometimes downright intrusive) to get customer feedback while they’re in the middle of trying to get something done.

The next best method is to be interactive.  In-person, phone, or IM chat interviews allow you to provide context and prompts to make it easier for your customer to give you feedback. You can describe a feature “do you remember using the ’sort and select’ feature? Let me describe it.  OK, now tell me about how you used it…”  and then it’s far easier for the customer to provide valuable feedback.

(While this method is primarily qualitative, you can ask for 1-5 ratings on the phone just as easily as in a survey.  Even better, because you can confirm that the customer really understands what they’re rating instead of just picking “3″ because they don’t remember what that feature was.)

Use pictures.

There are times when you need more responses than you can scalably get through interviews.  In those situations, illustrate!  Before asking a question, include a screenshot or even a quick video, to remind customers what they’re responding to.

Unfortunately, neither SurveyMonkey nor Wufoo nor Google Forms support embedding images in between questions by default, so this is less easy than it should be.  UserTesting.com is one option, or you can hack something together with multiple Wufoo or Google Forms pages and stick your own images in between.

What’s your biggest obstacle to getting customer feedback?

What else?  Generally, users are afraid of doing something wrong that will damage them.  They tend to give obscure (if any) feedback on how well you’re handling them. It’s hard to tell whether a little quirkiness is normal or an issue you should be rushing to customer support for emergency help.

The other thing they have in common is that product managers tend to react with a “more information is better” attitude.  Here! Read this incredibly dense user manual / 500 pages of What to Expect The First Year!

Because, of course, nothing says reassurance like making an already distraught user think and filter and worry while they’re trying to cull out that piece or two of information they need to feel okay.

So the product/design geek in me was incredibly pleased by the worksheet that Kaiser sent us home with.

Here’s what it does right:

• PRIORITIZES.  Only TWO things that you need to worry about with a newborn.
• KEEPS IT SIMPLE: All you need is a pencil and the ability to draw circles.  (Now is NOT the time to make your users worry about forgot passwords or flaky internet access!)
• CONTACT US: The phone number if something goes wrong is prominently placed and easy to remember.

It’s easy to get caught up in the technology and think with an all-or-nothing approach – we need to provide interactive help / online and searchable / beautifully designed.  What would our users think if we included a plain, simple, black-and-white text-only sheet of paper?

They’d probably be grateful.

I’m happy to report that we’ve made it through Day 14 and circled all the circles.  It’s good to be back!

Asking about past accomplishments doesn’t separate out your role from the environment (could you do it again in a different team, in a different industry?).  Asking for PRD writing samples proves that you’re literate, but doesn’t tell you anything about how well those requirements were understood or implemented.

As Eric Ries writes in a recent VentureBeat post:

I’m not interviewing for the right answer to the questions I ask. Instead, I want to see how the candidate thinks on their feet, and whether they can engage in collaborative problem solving. So I always frame interview questions as if we were solving a real-life problem, even if the rules are a little far-fetched.

These 8 questions are things I’d want to know if I were hiring a product manager.

They are biased towards smaller companies/more startup-like environments – they assume a breadth of responsibilities that may not be relevant for a big-company Product Manager.  But since there are no “right answers”, and since I’d expect any capable Product Manager to be able to think on their feet, I’d say they’re all fair game.

1. Your product is just about to hit code freeze, but the Sales team has gotten feedback that one of the company’s most important customers won’t buy it unless you add Feature X.  Talk through your process for understanding your options.
2. You’re reviewing product functional requirements with the engineering team, and your engineers tell you that developing Feature Y is “not possible”.  How do you respond?
3. You’ve discovered a bug in a product that has been deployed to an enterprise customer.  QA tells you the bug is an edge case – it will affect at most 1% of users, probably fewer – but for those it does impact, it will be an extremely negative user experience.  Take 10 minutes to compose an email response. (YES – actually make them write it.)
   
4. One of the Sales VPs is bugging you for an updated roadmap before he goes out to talk with a VIP customer.  You have a draft, but it hasn’t been internally approved or prioritized yet.  How do you help the Sales VP?
5. Your company uses a customer feedback tool where users can submit product enhancement ideas and vote on them.  There is a specific feature that is by far the most popular idea among your users – but it doesn’t align with your long-term product strategy.  How do you respond to the users?
6. You and the design team have collaborated on the workflow for a new feature, but your boss is convinced it should work another way.  You feel very confident in your version, and very strongly that her suggestion is a terrible one.  How do you move forward?
7. Imagine you have 2 days in which to develop a simple version 1.0 “to-do list” application.  You are the sole owner of getting this product functional and launched.  Take 20 minutes to document requirements for the product. (YES – actually make them write it.)
8. You’ve inherited a mature product and discovered that a lot of time is spent dealing with customer issues reactively.  What kind of process would you put in place to be more proactive about making sure the stuff that needs to get fixed, gets fixed?

Here’s why I chose these questions:

• They give lots of opportunities for candidate to ask questions or identify assumptions they’d operate under.
• They offer a view into the candidate’s negotiating style and confidence in their technical ability.
• Requiring on-the-spot writing shows their “everyday” communication skills (rather than allowing them to cherry-pick the best examples) and their ability to be diplomatic under pressure.
• Shows their attitude towards process (a lot or a little, like it or hate it, ownership vs. delegation balance)

There are no “right answers”, but there are definitely answers that are more (or less) suited to your company culture.

As a hiring manager, you may see gaps and still choose to hire someone – but at least you’re doing so with that knowledge.

As a job applicant, you can watch the body language of your interviewer as you answer.  You may see places where they obviously would’ve answered a different way – but again, if you take the job, you do so with that knowledge.

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

Scarcity makes things more appealing.  A couple weeks ago, there were Girl Scouts camped out near the BART exits on Market Street – with commuters lining up to buy boxes.   I know, because I was one of them.

Feeling like other people know something you don’t – also makes things more appealing.

IBM banner ad with a "replay" prompt

I was flipping between browser tabs yesterday when I saw this ad.   I hadn’t seen what played previously and I don’t particularly care about travel congestion or IBM.  But that “replay” call to action jumped out at me immediately – did I miss something? There must be some reason why I’d want to watch this!

It’s funny that this would work on me (yes, I clicked replay and watched the ad) – because I’m testing out the same concept in Loomia’s recommendations module.

I know that “popularity” is a strong driver for people to read an article or watch a video – but I’ve also seen through A/B testing that a predictive algorithm that takes context and similar readers’ behavior into account is a stronger driver.  What if we could combine them?

For all articles over a certain “popularity threshold”, we added an X People Viewed This annotation.

What this implies: not only is this probably something you want to read, but lots of other people read this.

What users think: 25,000+ people can’t be wrong.  What if I’m missing out on something useful?

The potential social cost of not being “in the know” outweighs the time cost of reading the article.

In advertising, many financial institutions are racing to reassure consumers with soothing messages — that focus on important “S” words: strength, safety, stability, security.  (Ads That Soothe when Banks are Failing, NYTimes)

Well, better late than never, I guess.  But this shouldn’t be a new trend.  It’s a long overdue step.  I’ve worked with consumers on financial applications since 2002, and one thing remains constant in that time: people are nervous about their money.

Whether someone is a paycheck-to-paycheck or a high net worth consumer, they feel a lot of anxiety around whether their money is safe, will their bills be paid on time, is their credit rating okay, are they saving more than spending, are they safe from identity theft.

And for the most part, banks have done a really crummy job of reassuring them.

Recently, threatened by drops in deposits and rises in withdrawals, banks have finally been forced to be a little bit more “human”.

A little humor:

“We love Chase,” reads the headline of an ad for Washington Mutual. “And not just because they have a trillion dollars.”

Or honesty:

“The current environment for investors is in many ways unprecedented and clearly unsettling,” the text of the letter begins on the Web site schwab.com.
“Is it a tough environment? Yes,” the letter continues. “Is it a time to be rash? No.”

Well, it’s good to see some effort applied to financial marketing, at least.

But the next step – and it’s a big one – will be to apply these same principles of strength, safety, stability, and security to financial institutions’ online experiences.  A soothing ad is one thing, but where is that concern when a first-time online banking customer is trying to understand the difference between current balance and projected balance?  When a customer can’t figure out when to schedule an online bill payment to arrive on time?

There’s still a long ways to go.

Please comment:

Who’s doing a good job of this? Financial institutions OR other product companies? Who is doing a good job with reassuring and making you feel like they respect your investment of time and money into their product? Comment away.

Most companies have realized: you don’t. Or rather, you can’t.

Solutions like Lithium, Get Satisfaction, Telligent, and SuggestionBox offer  ways to solicit customer feedback easily and harness your customer community to do a lot of the answering and helping for you.

Microsoft decided to build their own solution, and it’s a great example of how a product can include all the right features but provide an entirely unappealing user experience.

I don’t know what user research Microsoft did, but between surveying users and looking at other solutions out there, you might come up with a list of features like this:

• Ask specific questions about my computer’s configuration or software
• Look up error messages or documentation
• Answer questions
• Learn new things by tracking a specific user’s answers or answers on a certain topic

All of these features – and probably more – appear to be part of Microsoft Answers.

But there’s a big difference between what users ask for, and what users use.

Become the user and take a look at the homepage:

Where do you start?

What is there to do here?

There’s a lot of text and a lot of links on this page, but nothing to catch the eye. No prominent call to action.

Now let’s imagine why a customer would come to this site:

Sara, a new Windows Vista user, just installed a Windows Update patch and now is seeing some scary-looking error messages.  What should she do next?

Luis, who has set up data backups and cleared malware for all of his family, enjoys answering questions.  How can he contribute to this community?

It’s not about what customers ask for.  It’s about what they want to do and the experiences they want to have.

The customer doesn’t care about your business. If it’s not obvious that a product or service is going to meet their needs, they have no incentive to spend their time figuring it out.

Sara wants reassurance that her computer isn’t going to go berzerk and lose all her data.  Luis wants to feel useful.  Neither of them are likely to tell you that directly – you need to watch, ask open-ended questions, let the user narrate.

So what could Microsoft Answers do to help customers do the things they want to do and have the experiences they want?

A few thoughts:

• BIG search box.   Giving 20%, 30%, 40% of the screen real estate over to a search box sends the message that asking questions is what you’re supposed to do.
• BIG calls to action for the other main activities: register, find questions to answer.
• Be more dynamic.  The homepage feels like a Yahoo directory page, circa 1998.  An AJAX widget that showed live questions as they were asked would create a feeling of activity and responsiveness.
• Help constructing the question.  Newer users may find it hard to ask the question in way that gets answers.  A tag cloud showing technical terms and error codes that are frequently mentioned is an easier way to browse.
• Highlight recency.  Computer problems are cyclical – following a worm or a patch update or an upgrade.  Make it easy for customers to see what’s happening now.
• Claim your expertise.  For people who love to be helpful, give them a quick checkbox way to indicate the types of questions they’re good at answering – then immediately feed them a relevant question to answer.

Growing a community isn’t just a technical challenge – it’s a psychological, behavioral, experiential one.  You can seed a community with great content, but it won’t take off unless it feels inviting and responsive.

An organism needs to invest energy in being beautiful. You won’t see healthy skin on a sick animal, because maintaining a healthy coat is too ‘expensive’. A sick peacock isn’t as spectacular as a healthy one. Or a genetically damaged chimp isn’t going to have as symmetrical a face. As a result, most creatures evolved their definitions of beauty in a mate to match the displays of healthy creatures.  (Seth Godin, Beauty as a Signaling Strategy)

Great argument for why “looking good” has benefits beyond those that can be quantified.  An elegant design or a little bit of flair can rarely be directly connected to a 2% higher utilization or 4% efficiency gain, but it sets a tone, an expected level of values.  It’s the tip of the iceberg: if we care this much about this little detail that you can see, just imagine how much care we put into the massive underlying platform that isn’t immediately visible.

The reverse is true as well: I’ve been mortified during customer demos when a big, obvious, sloppy misalignment or typo was present in our beta application. 

The customer won’t notice, said the engineer who didn’t have time to fix it.

If you can’t spell correctly, how can we trust you to run our business, said the customer.

It’s going to be tempting in this economic climate for companies to cut back on “beauty” – whether that means preserving a page layout by not bombarding it with ads, or taking a few extra seconds to make a customer service call more effective.  But product managers should think about what that says about your overall “health” as a company.  Do you want to look like a wounded animal?  Now is not the time to have a vulnerable-looking product.

“I’m glad to hear the product is performing for you,” I said.  “But stepping back for a moment from our current product, I’m curious – if our product could address any one pain point, your biggest pain point, what would that be?”

The response was a pause, then a surprised look.

“You help us do “X” better,” said the general manager, “and that’s great.  But our biggest source of revenues is “Y”.  I mean, “Y” probably accounts for 20x as much value as “X”.   That’s our biggest problem to solve… is there any way you could help us with that?”

The answer was yes.  “Y” is actually a fairly logical extension of our technology.  The only reason we hadn’t built it is that we didn’t know the demand was there.  A few more phone calls confirmed: we had multiple customers, happy customers, who were secretly wanting a product that we could build, but it had never occurred to them to suggest it.

There’s two important concepts here, I think.  One, it’s not your customers’ job to tell you what they want.  You need to ask open-ended questions, listen to what they’re saying and what they’re not saying, and stop framing things in terms of existing solutions.  Two, being asked for your opinion is a pleasant surprise.  You never know what people might say as thanks for being asked!

“We do X and Y for your site and Z is the benefit you’ll see.”

“Oh, so you’re like Company B?”

“No, we don’t compete with them.  They do P and Q, we do X and Y.”

Nope, guess what?  You do compete with them.  When your audience sees you as part of the same solution set, you are competing for their attention and their comprehension.  They may not issue an RFP where they lay out exactly what they need and assess how you vs. company B meet their needs.  You probably won’t even get that far.

It’s not the customer’s responsibility to figure out exactly what differentiates you from other companies, and it’s not their burden to figure out how to use your technology “right”.   Your competition is every other option that your customers would choose if you weren’t around.

Who’s the competitor you should fear the most?  Status quo.  Doing nothing different is a really attractive vendor.  It’s cheap.  It doesn’t require learning any new technology.  It doesn’t require justification in a budgeting meeting or drive up customer service calls.

(Seventy years ago, I’m sure there were television enthusiasts who cared how they worked.  Indeed, they would have to, because I’m pretty sure television sets in the early 1940s behaved an awful lot like computers in the late 1980s/early 1990s – unpredictable and prone to odd behaviors that corrected themselves when you gave them a solid whack on the side.)

Posterous knows that for most people, they don’t know how file uploading works and they don’t care.  They just want their stuff to be in a place where other people can access their stuff, preferably without having to learn about something they don’t care about.

What’s brilliant about this service is that it capitalizes on the way users were already behaving.

Non-techie: “I need to put these images up where other people can easily see them.”

Techie: “OK – you need to use this secure FTP app and then upload them to our web directory.  It’s slash user slash web slash home slash–”
Non-techie: …

Non-techie: “Why don’t I just email you the files and you tell me where I can see them on the web?”

Posterous works exactly like this (except automating the role of the human techie intermediary).  You send an email to them with files, they magically email you back with a URL where you can see them.

Great example #1: It’s hard to change user behavior. Look for ways that you can support people’s natural, pre-existing behaviors.  (I read in ZDNet recently email described as a “comfort app” – one that doesn’t impose a lot of rules, it just works)

You don’t even have to register first.  When you send an email, you’re automatically providing the minimum information the service needs to know from you: where they can contact you.

Great example #2: The higher the perceived friction, the fewer people will try it. In general, trying new things is hard.  People don’t like feeling like novices and risking making mistakes.  Making that “novice” stage seem as fast – or non-existent – as possible relieves that stress.

To take it one step further, making things seem ridiculously easy is such a novelty that you can attract people who weren’t even interested in your site in the first place!

Great example #3:  Start now, customize later. The simple as possible setup options often aren’t enough to get users to stick around forever.  They’ll want more control.  The time to offer it is after they’ve decided to try you out, and engaged.

Posterous upsells extra configuration options – but only after they’ve shown you what they can do.

As always, I am not associated with Posterous – I just like what they’ve done!