By Ellis Pratt
Companies spend a lot of money finding appropriate emotional words to persuade prospective customers to buy their products or services. However, this word choice changes once you become a customer. When it comes to giving customers support and assistance, emotional words nearly always disappear; information suddenly becomes like Mr. Spock in Star Trek—cool and unemotional.
With technology now a part of our daily lives, is it time to make our supporting product information—user guides and Help pages—reflect more closely our users' feelings? In other words, can we turn the perception of a dusty manual that no one reads into one of a tool that leads customers to love your product?
This type of approach to support documentation—one that creates a more positive emotional experience for the user—is called “Affective Assistance.” What we've discovered is that it's important to look at more than just the words you use.
The Reasons Why You Might Want To Create Affective Assistance
Aligning with the Organization's Objectives
Many businesses are moving away from only focusing on being the cheapest. Instead, they're looking to build brand loyalty though better design, image, and service.
In order to build these positive brand relationships, organizations need to manage the users' emotional experiences during every encounter with their products or services. This means they're designing products aimed to build experiences that engage and capture the user's attention, creating an emotional relationship between the product and the person who uses it. We know from usability testing that people find pleasurable products attractive: they make them feel good, leaving them satisfied emotionally. Some claim this is leading organizations to have more nurturing and caring business values.
The Impact of the Social Web
Organizations are changing, but so are users. Today, customers have a voice via social media sites such as YouTube and Twitter. What we've seen with the explosion of social media is that people want to be listened to and to share their experiences. They love having conversations—a two-way dialogue.
Technical documentation written today really doesn't take into account the different states of emotion users have. This leads to users bypassing documentation completely, as they expect it won't meet their needs. According to Kathy Sierra, Help is traditionally written for an audience that is calm and intellectually curious, but she points out that sometimes users get frustrated and angry.
Recognizing the Power of Emotion
Affective Assistance aligns your user documentation with emotionally engaged and loyal customers. It recognizes a user's “state of mind” and delivers content that is best suited to that state. It may even contain techniques that move users from a negative to a positive state. It's also in alignment with the way in which people are seeking and sharing knowledge in their daily lives, increasing their usage.
The Reasons Why You Might Not Want to Create Affective Assistance
Technical writing generally follows a style that's been around for 30 years—clear, unambiguous, and unemotional (see Felker et al.). This style works when technology seems scary and you are afraid you might break things, and when safety is paramount.
When these situations are still true for your customers today, then the vast majority of your support information should stay in that standard style. Nobody wants any uncertainty in the minds of aircraft maintenance engineers, for example.
It's important not to lose the trust and credibility of your audience, which can happen if the tone of voice is wrong for the audience. If it comes across as “marketing bull****,” for example, then it's likely it won't be read.
You also may not want this approach if your organization has a very hierarchical “command and control” culture. If users and staff relate to a dominant authority, then an authoritarian tone of voice may be better to use.
Microsoft's “Clippy” or Office Assistant, to give it its formal name, is an example of a tone of voice and context that caused more harm than good. Nobody wants to create their own version of Clippy, do they?
How to Implement Affective Assistance
No idea is ever totally original. In 2000, Professor Saul Carliner explained how to include an affective element in user guides: “Design is an essential ingredient to the success of all these efforts. For example, to develop an online interaction, a technical communicator must not only write the message presented to users, but must first predict users' goals, moods, and motivations, and gear the message accordingly. If several different types of users encounter the same content, then the communicator must also discover this difference and display a message that's tailored not only to the context and mood, but to the type of user.”
Plan From the Start
Whoever creates the content needs to do more than just writing and the page layout. Affective Assistance works when it's planned from the start—when the product or service is being designed—and when it's fully tested by users prior to the official release.
It's More About the Context
Usability research shows us that an anxious user is less able to think creatively when they encounter problems. In this situation, all the relevant information needs to be close at hand and not overwhelming for the user.
We want to create a feeling that there's a “guide on the side” ready to help them when they need it. It needs to get people's attention in the right way: attracting and persuading users to take particular actions. This means the context—when, where, how it appears—is as important as the words themselves.
The Tone of Voice
Ideally, the Help needs to support a more human-like interaction. For example, you can design assistance that is dominant or submissive, friendly or unfriendly, depending on the situation.
According to usability expert Trevor van Gorp, in most cases you can attract users by presenting a visual personality that is similar to their own. We're attracted to things that look similar to the way we are or the way we'd like to see ourselves. This may mean you need to create more than one deliverable to suit the different personas.
Below is an example of a Help page written in a submissive, friendly style. I've highlighted in bold font the phrases that are in that style:
Remember, Affective Assistance is more than the tone of voice, it also depends on context. Obviously, this tone of voice will affect the localization of the text.
Data Explains, Stories Inspire
In addition to the tone of voice, you can also incorporate affective e-learning techniques to user documentation.
The “3S model”—Simulation, Stories, and Scenarios—communicates information in vivid, emotional ways. Video simulations and the use of stories, in particular, are proven ways to make information more memorable and engaging for users.
Presenting instructions in comic form is another approach that has been used for many years. According to Alan J. Porter, “Comics can make you laugh, cry, gasp in wonder, shake in terror and they can also make great instruction manuals, training aids, white papers, or any other type of business or technical communication you can think of.”
Does It Work?
Measuring emotions and brand loyalty are notoriously difficult things to do. However, you can measure any changes in the number of people reading a page that is online, and you can measure any changes to the number and nature of support calls.
Michael Verdi, content manager for the Firefox SUMO Support Forum, reported a change to a more submissive, friendly style resulted in a 13.1% increase in page hits (1,170 people/day).
Porter claimed the most widely read piece of technical documentation in the history of the U.S. Army, officially known as “DA Pam 750-30 Operation and Preventative Maintenance of the M16A1 Rifle,” is a comic book better known by the troops as “How to Love Your Rifle.” Here is an example from this manual:
Who Should Write This Type of Information?
If the style of writing needs to change from what we normally find in a user guide, should the person doing the writing change as well?
Since our primary objective is still to tell rather than sell (to convey clear and unambiguous information), we're still in the realm of the technical author rather than a copywriter. Also, the information structure and how it is delivered (areas where technical authors excel) are as important as any change in the writing style.
Summary
Affective Assistance provides us, in certain situations, with an opportunity to use the power of positive, emotional engagement to create more passionate and loyal users as well as better users of our products. This approach is not just about the words or the page layout. It needs to be carefully designed to the users' situation, with consideration of the context in which it appears.
In many situations, affective assistance is not suitable. User assistance still needs to be clear and unambiguous, and safety and risk consideration may preclude this approach.
According to Anne Gentle, “The technical communication world is on the brink of a major cultural shift from one-sided ‘documentation’.” By giving users useful, usable, and pleasurable experiences, this shift promises to result in more positive relationships with our customers.
Ellis Pratt (ellis@cherryleaf.com) is sales and marketing director of Cherryleaf, a technical writing services company that helps organizations create knowledge their users will love. In addition to its writing services, it also offers consultancy and training in Affective Assistance and other technical writing skills.
References
“Adding a Subscribe Link to Your Email Footer.” Mad Mini Help, http://help.madmimi.com/subscribe-links/.
Carliner, Saul. “Physical, Cognitive, and Affective: A Three-part Framework for Information Design.” Technical Communication 47.4 (Nov. 2000): 561–76.
Felker, Pickering, Charrow, Holland, and Redish. “Guidelines for document designers.” 1981.
Gentle, Anne. Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. XML Press, 2009.
Porter, Alan J. “Comics Can Make You a Better Communicator.” The Content Wrangler (8 Jan. 2010), http://thecontentwrangler.com/2010/01/08/comics-can-make-you-a-better-communicator/.
Sierra, Kathy. Presentation at Business of Software 2009 conference, http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/05/kathy-sierra-at-business-of-software-2009.html.
