Winning people over by usability. But what about user profiles, data breaches and privacy concerns?
In my previous post, I introduced usability in general as a tool to lower the hurdles that might afflict random passers-by to become users of your service. Even more, usability provides you with chances to discern your service from alternative services, it’s relatively simple to implement and, once established, in your process of design and of supplying users with benefit, it helps to get out word of mouth for the benefit of your service. Applied well, usability helps to keep your users, instead of scaring them away. — Some posts ago, I claimed you need to convince the user to take every single step you want them to take. That’s what usability is for — or at least what it helps in: It helps to win them over.
An example for when usability won me over is Google’s GMail: When Google bought Blogger.com, they already were well-known for the high usability of their products. Which hinted for some Blogger.com improvements in the future. But first, Google used the acquired platform to offer GMail invites to a small share of Blogger.com bloggers. I knew they might display that invitation only once to me — if at all –, therefore I took the bait when I got it. (That’s drilling people for taking baits, but that’s a different story.) GMail at that time was something really, really great. One gigabyte of mail storage was far beyond everything any other freemail provider ever offered. Plus, GMail was invite-only. You didn’t know whether it’d be ever available for free, without any invitation. They told you they would close your account if you’d abuse it. And they asked you for some personal data.
As said, I took the bait: What Google offered was something really precious. Therefore, I handed over that little bit of personal info. Until that moment in time neither Blogger.com nor Google had any explicit piece of personal data on me. (Of course, Google had what they gathered by their cookies, and that’s probably a rather lot, but they unlikely had my real name connected to that aggregated cookie harvest.)
However, what happened here was an exchange: They gave me some service, I fed them data. The reason for that was that they offered me something that looked really preciously to me. — In other words, they won me over to take that bait.
On the other hand, at least at that time, Google was badly reputated amongst privacy activists. What made me take the bait mostly was my confidence in their quality of service and into the usability they provide. Plus the insight, Google could not afford to loose customers’ private data.
Loosing personal data is what’s going on now since a few years: Big companies loose thousands .. millions of customer data records, endangering these individuals’ legal lives. To avoid this risk, a while ago I pointed out a social network not necessarily depends on a high-profile user data record but instead a combination of e-mail address and password would suffice.
However, if to provide your service you need a bit more personal info, you can gain a point in terms of usability here: Probably facets of your service need different pieces of personal data. You might tend to ask for all the data at once, so you save the effort to ask for missing pieces when needed. — On the other hand: As long as you don’t know the data, there is not the least risk you could loose them to data breaches. Plus, none of your users-to-be would wonder why the heck you want to know that suspectible bit of personal data from them right now. — If people are not yet comfortable with your service they might suspect bad intents if you ask them for private data. Whereby these suspicions may add up and discredit your service despite you didn’t fight the least bit against these people.
So, if you wouldn’t flee the effort to ask the users for personal right when — and only when — needed, it’ll be obvious for them why exactly you need — hence ask — for that particular bit of data right now then. — Positive side effect is that you don’t delay people from using your service by demanding them to hand over personal data or, even worse, fill out a pages long form. (NB. I blogged on keeping the user’s personal data footprint small just a month ago.)
Geni, some genealogy web service, took the chance to put their service up-front and to come up with asking for user data only when needed. That’s similar to a service offering its core functionality for free but asking for the purchase of extras, such as WordPress.com for the ability to edit your blog’s CSS layout data or as Xing.com selling the service to let you know who exactly visited your user’s profile. However, Geni got the reward for approaching users the way they do — that’s 5,000,000 user profiles in less than half a year. A List Apart has an article on what you can do well by gradually engaging the user, i.e. asking the user for personal data only when needed, and also features a handful of advices how to approach users-to-be. — My suggested read for today.
