We're now in part 6 of Expectation versus Satisfaction arc. I shared in part 1 of this arc that I'm not shocked by the information in the article and asked "Why is expectation so low?". I'm suggesting answers from Reading Virtual Minds, Chapter 6, "Expectation versus Satisfaction".
This arc was spawned by regular reader Susan Prager sending me Site Development Lags Expectations.
The theme of this arc is based on observing people browsing websites demonstrating minute anxiety responses even though they're in an (assumedly) safe environment. Part 2 of this arc offered that unmet expectations is the reason for the anxiety. Part 3 dealt with people responding to new forms of information. In part 4 we dealt with the difference between expectation and satisfaction and in part 5 we discussed the fact that more plays into how visitors respond to your website than design issues.
Readers from the eastern US might remember how the 2004 Red Sox World Series and playoff standings affected people's excitement level on line, regardless of the site they were visiting? NextStage routinely creates and uses such reports internally for research purposes. One of my favorite examples of these internal reports is shown in the figure on the right and shows that people's expectation is based on far more than any thoughts of the website they're visiting. Internally we've taken to calling this slide "Bad Day at Black Rock" (with all due respect to the Spencer Tracy movie of the same name) because we noticed that visitors to all websites in our system were having bad experiences during this time period. The level of experience was so uniform as to be statistically invalid. Fortunately, Susan (wife, co-founder, -inventor and -developer of Evolution Technology) is a much better sociologist than I. She took a look at the time interval involved and explained what we were observing (10 April - 16 April '03). Readers with a detective bent are invited to see if they can figure out what Susan uncovered before the next post in this series.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Links for this post:
- Blog posts about Reading Virtual Minds, Chapter 6 "Expectation versus Satisfaction"
- Blog posts about Reading Virtual Minds, Chapter 7 "Experience versus Expectation"
- Consumer Psychology posts
- Expectation posts
- Reading Virtual Minds
- Reading Virtual Minds, Chapter 6, "Experience versus Expectation"
- Site Development Lags Expectations
- Susan Prager
- The Site Development Lags Expectation blog arc:
(Information in this arc is from Chapter 6, "Experience Versus Expectation" of my next book, Reading Virtual Minds. Text and images copyright Joseph Carrabis and NextStage Evolution 2006-2007)
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Tracked on: April 6, 2007 10:15 AM | Permalink to Trackback