If you’ve ever designed or taken a survey, you’ve probably encountered a Likert-type question. For these questions, the survey-taker rates his or her impressions about a given statement or experience on a scale, usually from 1 to 5 or 1 to 7, with words to guide what the points on the scale mean. For example:
As someone who’s written and taken plenty of surveys, I get a kick out of Likert-type wording creeping into my everyday life. If someone asks me how my dinner was, I imagine myself placing it on one of those scales — ”good” or “very good” or “excellent”? (“not very delicious,” “delicious,” “extremely delicious”?)
I recently encountered a couple of businesses using different Likert-like endpoints in their marketing and communications. In one case, a doctor’s office I visit has declared a mission to provide “very good service.” The office’s automated appointment reminder points out that the call is part of the office’s “effort to provide you with very good service,” and a recent communication asked me to please notify the office if anything was “less than very good.” Every time I hear this, I giggle. “Very good” can be a reasonable endpoint for a Likert-type question (as a complement to “very poor,” for example), but it also has the effect of seeming like a low bar. Why strive for “very good”? Why not go all the way to “excellent”?
On the other hand, I spotted a truck for a carpet installation service driving down Highway 101 over the weekend, and its advertisement promised “the most outstanding service experience ever.” Not just outstanding — the most outstanding ever? Now that’s a company that’s not afraid to aim high!
So: Set the bar lower, presumably expecting to vault over it? Or go for sky-high expectations from the start? I’m not sure it matters as long as the actual service is the best it can be, but the two approaches certainly leave me with different feelings about a business’s confidence in its ability to deliver. What do you think?
This week, we — like, well, everyone? — couldn’t stop talking about Google’s augmented-reality glasses (and chuckling at parodies of them). Are the glasses a cool sign of a contextually aware future to come — or a blow to the serendipity and surprise of daily life?
Ever feel a little down when a website tells you that you “haven’t added any friends yet” or “have no upcoming events”? Screenshots of Despair collects all the mopiest status messages from your heartless technology products into one melancholy, yet hilarious, stream of sadness.
Picnic pants? We’re just gonna leave it there.
A big part of what we do at EchoUser is tell stories. Whether we’re designing an interface from scratch, putting a new product in front of real-life users, or researching the needs of a client’s customers, we have to figure out how to make all the pieces of quantitative and qualitative feedback come together into one coherent narrative. When I’m analyzing results and looking through quotes from interviews and usability sessions, I’m looking for the bits that best tell the overall story of how people reacted to the ideas, products, or services they saw.
There are plenty of places I turn for examples of great storytelling, from magazines to movies to TV shows. But podcasts are one of my favorite sources of inspiration. We’re generally visual people here — we tweak interfaces or present our findings with graphics and slides — and so I’m impressed by those who tell compelling stories with only words and sounds. Some of my go-tos:
This American Life — Now it’s a classic example of radio storytelling, but back when I first encountered the show, I remember thinking I’d never heard anything quite like its mix of journalism, personal history, and humor.
Radiolab — To say Radiolab is “about science” under-states the weird, wonderful world it exposes. To be honest, for the longest time, I thought the “lab” part just referred to the way the show plays with sounds and textures; I felt kind of silly when I finally figured out the scientific connection.
99% Invisible — Short stories (most are under 20 minutes) about design and architecture, from what goes into making a stamp design to why we can’t steer a car with our eyes closed.
The Memory Palace — It’s about history, I suppose, but it’s really just a great selection of bite-sized tidbits about the curious characters that left their mark on society in various eras. I like to queue a bunch of these up at once for a little Memory Palace binge.
Where do you turn to hear great stories?
