CHAPTER 18

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SEARCH FOR ECOMMERCE HELP SYSTEMS

COAUTHORED BY TRICIA CLEMENT OF JUXTWORKS.COM

Aspirin versus Vitamins PAGE 2

Stick to Established Best Practices PAGE 4

Creating a Comprehensive User Assistance Strategy PAGE 12

Web site user support that consistently exceeds customer's expectations can help catapult your company to legendary status and create brand equity you can measure in billions of dollars. To shed light on this important topic, in this chapter, I have teamed up with renowned cognitive psychologist and Web site user assistance expert Tricia Clement to offer some actionable insights about online user assistance mechanisms.

ASPIRIN VERSUS VITAMINS

We can broadly classify Web site user assistance content or components as either:

• aspirin—Painkiller solutions that address an acute problem for people who need assistance right now
• vitamins—Supplement solutions for process optimization and longer-term learning and training

Aspirin-oriented help features should be aimed at immediately alleviating the short-term pain of an acute problem. Problems in need of painkiller-oriented help mechanisms represent clear diversions from customers' desired tasks and usually arise when customers are completely stuck and looking for an immediate fix to their problems.

A customer's mindset when looking for such content is that of fear—for example, a fear of losing money, losing time, or feeling stupid. The natural response to such fear is usually anger and frustration, a highly emotional state, and painkiller help solutions need to take the customer's complex emotional state into account. Aspirin help content must present a straightforward and simple way to address the customer's immediate problem, as shown in Figure 18.1.

Unlike painkiller help solutions that offer immediate fixes, Vitamin help solutions maximize user effectiveness. Vitamins are preventative in nature. You need to take them in advance. So customers need to read vitamin-oriented help before performing tasks and interactions for it to be effective. Generally, preventative help comes in the form of tutorials and articles that you expect customers to review with a calmer mindset, when seeking opportunities for gradual learning with the goal to obtain beneficial long-term knowledge and skills. As Figure 18.2 shows, vitamin-oriented help solutions can be much more sophisticated, taking the form of interactive multipage tutorials or video presentations.

FIGURE 18.1 Aspirin-oriented super saver shipping help on Amazon.com

FIGURE 18.2 Vitamin Help—A J2EE tutorial on Oracle.com

Given these different and distinct uses for help content, it is beneficial to classify help content using the following three attributes:

• immediacy—Aspirin-oriented help versus preventative vitamin help
• depth of knowledge—How versus the why of how
• touch—Static content versus a phone call

Each axis in Figure 18.3 represents one of the attributes you can use to evaluate each component of a Help system to determine whether it is appropriate to the task, the existing level of customer knowledge, the task's level of complexity, and the sensitivity of the issue.

FIGURE 18.3 Three attributes of Web site user assistance

When evaluating the appropriateness of Help content to each specific use case, consider where your content falls along each of these attribute axes.

STICK TO ESTABLISHED BEST PRACTICES

People expect to find help even faster and easier than they can find your merchandise or content, so in most cases, it is safest to stick with the established mental models and design practices for Web site user assistance.

Most functional and usable examples of Web-based user assistance follow a similar design, often including the following components:

• proactive inline Help
• a single Help landing page
• navigation optimized for browsing rather than keyword search
• complete Help solutions offered through multiple landing pages

On the best Web sites, these components work together to provide effective user assistance.

Proactive Inline Help

Inline help provides the first line of defense against customer frustration by proactively offering both aspirin and vitamin help content where you know your customers are most likely to need it. Inline help is part of the site's integral functionality. Where necessary, it is more extensive but may be absent entirely where functionality is familiar or easy to understand. Figure 18.4 shows the excellent inline help Netflix provides to assist customers with putting their account on hold. There is enough information embedded on the page to enable confident on-the-spot decision making. There's no need to navigate anywhere else for more information. The page even explains how to reactivate the account later.

FIGURE 18.4 Excellent inline help on Netflix.com

The expectations for inline help are usually low, so inline help often delights customers because of the care and attention a company has invested in placing the right help content where customers need it most. People usually perceive inline help as easy to follow and, in most cases, it can painlessly take care of 90% of customers' need for assistance.

A Single Help Landing Page

For reasons of neglect or internal politics, many sites require customers to seek out the information they need within many different sections. Offering dispersed collections of content without a single, well-integrated help landing page often confuses customers about what kinds of help are available and which content might actually support the need at hand.

In contrast, the best Web sites provide a single help landing page where customers can obtain help of all kinds:

• help search
• common questions
• a help index
• contact information, including email addresses, phone numbers, chat and community links

TurboTax offers one of the best examples of a single help landing page, as shown in Figure 18.5.

This page presents a clear process customers can easily follow to resolve their problems. Most options are clearly organized. However, customers must click a link to see a complete index of help topics.

FIGURE 18.5 An excellent help landing page for TurboTax

Amazon also provides an excellent help landing page, as shown in Figure 18.6. Note its relatively recent addition of a prominent Contact Us button. This is an improvement over its former help page, which required customers to choose a category before seeing the Contact Us button.

FIGURE 18.6 Improved help landing page on Amazon

The Amazon help landing page devotes a great deal of critical real estate to selling the Kindle and related products. Although it may seem like a good idea to market the new device, the help landing page is not the best place for promoting products. First, too much information about Kindle on the help page may naturally raise some questions about how many problems someone could expect when using the device. Second, people with problems to solve might be annoyed by seeing so much distracting promotional content.

Navigation That Is Optimized for Browsing Rather Than Keyword Search

So what role does search play when implementing help-related features?

Science Fiction writer and futurist Ray Bradbury famously wrote in The Illustrated Man (Doubleday & Company, 1951): “You need to know part of the answer in order to ask the right question.” In other words, a person seeking help has to know the right terms to type into the search box, which is often not the case. Therefore, keyword search is often a customer's last resort before contacting customer support.

The good news is that, precisely because people are not familiar with a topic for which they are seeking help, they are more likely to type in general terms. Thus, designers should optimize the finding experience for general keywords and offer additional links to encourage exploration, making the experience far closer to browsing than to traditional keyword search. Even the simple search powerhouse Google opted for a friendlier browsable interface for its Help page, as shown in Figure 18.7.

FIGURE 18.7 Browsable help page on Google

A specialized use case for searching help is to search for the exact text of an error message when troubleshooting a problem. Advanced technical knowledge systems such as Oracle MetaLink and the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) are optimized for this type of search. However, even for this use case, the user interface is closer to that for browsing than it is to traditional search. The MSDN help search results in Figure 18.8 look different from the kinds of search results you examined previously in this book—the results that appear when customers search for specific items or content.

FIGURE 18.8 MSDN support search results

Gone are the prominent refinement controls, sort controls, and classification aspects from each row in the search results. Instead, each search result is considerably more prominent, with a text summary and multiple links to related items to encourage lateral exploration. Depending on the sophistication of an audience, such a page might also include some general refinement controls for topic or content type; however, in the best systems, these filters are seldom prominent. The designer's ultimate focus should be on providing a complete solution, including lots of links that enable customers to navigate laterally or even widen their search instead of constraining it further.

Complete Help Solutions through Multiple Landing Pages

The best help systems strive to provide a complete solution. On the HP help site shown in Figure 18.9, the LaserJet printer page is a landing page that provides all the available aspirin-oriented help and vitamin help links for that printer, including user manuals, printer drivers, and setup guides. If just learning how to do something does not satisfy a customer, there are also lots of links to more sophisticated information that communicates the why of how, including links to support forums, upgrades, and parts.

FIGURE 18.9 HP LaserJet help landing page—a complete solution

Even though, in this case, a customer arrived at the HP LaserJet help landing page by searching for help, the user experience is much more that of a browsing user interface that gently guides customers to a complete help solution for a product, offering links for further investigation.

CREATING A COMPREHENSIVE USER ASSISTANCE STRATEGY

To put all your Web site user assistance content into action, you need a comprehensive experience strategy. An ideal user assistance strategy includes four goals:

• Manage expectations.
• Show that you care.
• Strive for an easy help experience.
• Finish on a positive note.

The four goals of a user assistance strategy are now covered 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.

The good news is that help is the feature in which small delights can quickly add up to a positive overall experience.

As shown in Figure 18.10, Overstock.com expertly manages expectations on its 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.

FIGURE 18.10 Overstock expertly manages expectations for waiting time

A general strategy for managing expectations is as follows:

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

As for the zero search results pages described in Chapter 1, “Starting from Zero: Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages,” 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 the following:

• Provide the right assistance in the right place at the right time.
• Use the level of explanation appropriate to the task.
• Never force customers to learn, but instead provide straight-forward, clear answers with lots of options to learn more.
• Provide information appropriate to the knowledge level of a customer.
• Never make 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 suggests 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.

Some big companies go to great lengths to show they do care, but few manage to come across as sincere. Figure 18.11 shows the Travelocity Bill of Rights along with its signature gnome character.

FIGURE 18.11 Travelocity shows it cares

Because Travelocity has made caring for customers an integral part of its 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

Customers' evaluation of a help system encompasses both their expectations and their satisfaction with the help system's performance which is ultimately why Staples has made the phrase “That was easy!” its 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 cognitive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularized. The Travelocity user assistance, shown in Figure 18.12, does a good job of maintaining a sense of flow by providing both Related Answers and Previously Viewed Answers.

FIGURE 18.12 Travelocity offers useful links

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

Finish on a Positive Note

For 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 such as a stolen credit card, a broken item, or a delay in shipping. Strong negative emotions directly affect customers' brand perceptions; 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 after 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 18.13 shows a particularly cumbersome example of a feedback form for the Oracle 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? Although 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 J2EE 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.

FIGURE 18.13 A cumbersome, noncontextual feedback form

BEST PRACTICES

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. When designing help systems, it helps to keep in mind the following best practices:

• To design an optimal user assistance experience, you need to think holistically about all the touch points along the way. To serve the right help at the right time, you need 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 creating a story, film, or 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.

REFERENCES

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

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.

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

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.