The quiz on FutureNowInc.com blog that rattled me
You wouldn’t think a simple quiz would make you feel unsafe, would you?
And if it were a topic that you were quite comfortable with, there’s even less reason to feel concern. You’d think so, but that’s not how our brains work. Our brains don’t like to be surprised.
And my brain got surprised at a little past 4:55am this morning
I checked my email, saw a link to the blog at FutureNowInc, and hey, it’s a quiz. I started to answer the quiz, and within minutes I was feeling very disconcerted. And there were several reasons for me feeling a little jittery (and no, it wasn’t the early morning—I work fine at this time of the morning). It was the fact that the quiz was somehow ‘tricking’ me.
Now I know that the quiz wasn’t set up to trick anyone
Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg (who I know personally, and very well too) wouldn’t have set up the quiz to create a fear of ‘unsafety’. They’d have specifically set it up to test the knowledge, and to empower the readers. But when I started getting tricky questions, I bailed out of the quiz.
So what are tricky questions?
1) You’re asked to choose two answers out of four (always tricky).
What should you do?: Always get the client to choose just one answer.
2) You then expect to choose one (or two answers) out of four. But instead, the right answer is all ‘four’.
What should you do?: Avoid ambushing the client. If you’re going to have tricky questions, I need to know at the start.
This post isn’t meant to do a deep analysis on the quiz. Instead what I’m trying to get across to you is that even a simple quiz that contains no real reward (except the thrill of getting things right) can be very confusing. A person who feels rattled by the quiz, may then create a memory of quizzes on your site being tricky. And hence avoiding them.
None of us set out to trick the customer.
None of us set out to make the customer feel uncomfortable.
And yet, in tiny ways, we create a discomfort factor.
And not only does it hinder consumption (I didn’t get past question 3), but it also hinders attraction and conversion the next time around.
Ahem, the quiz. Try it out for yourself.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jeff // Mar 10, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Thanks for the post, Sean,
Yeah, the quiz came off as tricky. Initially, we didn’t have the ability to use multiple answer questions, so we rewrote them all to be single answer. Then when we were given this newfound ability, we went back to our old questions and didn’t follow-up with new directions to the user. A clear case of technology getting in the way of usability; just because you CAN do something doesn’t always mean that you SHOULD.
As you might guess, this applies to Websites, too, both in the obvious way in which wiz-bang technology gets in the way of ease-of-use, and in the less thought about idea of user directions. A lot of Website developers expect that design cues will make things intuitively obvious and then (for fear of being redundant) fail to spell it out with simple directions. Don’t be afraid to give directions. In the case of the quiz, a simple, “make sure to check 2 items” or “Feel free to check all that apply” would have saved a lot of quiz takes some grief.
2 Sean D'Souza // Mar 10, 2009 at 12:15 pm
I agree.
I trip over myself all the time.
Having a structure to follow helps keep the trickiness out. We recently had to change an entire page on our site because we didn’t follow a structure, and then the page became kinda ‘tricky’ and confusing.
3 Flora Morris Brown, Ph.D. // Mar 11, 2009 at 7:52 pm
This reminds me of how difficult it can be to write simple instructions. I’ve found it very helpful to have someone else read them before I publish because what’s clear to me is just not always clear to others.
Sometimes we unintentionally trip people up. It should, of course, be our goal to avoid this.
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