The Experience is the Brand

Snacking – A Serious Study

For fun, and partly to get an “inside” view of how other companies compose and conduct surveys, I’m on the Harris Poll survey panel. (So are about a million other people.) About 1-2 times a month I get invited to participate in an online poll. You answer the questions, they give you a certain amount of “points”, and with enough points you can “buy” things like CDs, DVDs, and mini-deep fryers. I’ve been wanting a mini deep-fryer.

This past week I’ve been participating in a poll about snacking. Don’t ask me why. (Ok, at the end of every survey, they ask you how likely you are to participate in another survey. I must have said “I probably will”, or something like that.) This time around the poll consists of an initial survey, followed by 7 daily mini-surveys, and finally a wrap up survey on the 8th day. The questions are fairly germaine (how many snacks did you have today, when did you have them, were they sweet/salty/chewey/hot/cold, etc.) But it’s the answers to some of the questions that have me baffled.

For each snack that you report having had during the day, you’re asked to choose from a list of several reasons why you had that particular snack. (Imagine that, throughout the course of the day, you’ve had 3 snacks – can you imagine yourself capable of remembering, several hours later, your particular motivation for each one?) Some of the answers make sense to me:

• I wanted something sweet
• I wanted something to hold me off until dinner
• I was hungry

But some of them have me absolutely stumped:

• I wanted a tiny taste of something really indulgent.
• I wanted something that I would be proud to serve to my friends and family.
• I wanted something with a fresh, bold taste.

In my whole life, I have never said to myself, “I want something with a fresh bold taste…. I think I’ll have some Frito’s Brand Fresh and Bold Nacho Chips,” which is how I imagine the results of this survey are going to be portrayed.

Here are my top answers, most of which aren’t included in the multiple-choice lists I’m presented with:

• I was walking past the kitchen and saw it sitting on the table.
• I was looking for something to jam into my mouth to keep me from having to participate in a boring conversation with a coworker.
• It fell out of the sky.

Count to Three

In a recent article exploring the “three click rule”, Josh Porter of UIE explores whether or not the commonly known (if not well understood) dictum of keeping every piece of content three clicks away is supportable by user testing. His basic conclusion is that, no, user testing doesn’t bear this out, if you look at things like task completion time and user satisfaction. (This is the second in a series of articles from UIE attempting to “debunk” popular usability “myths”.)

But frankly, I’m at a loss for a good resource for the actual definition of the “three clicks rule”. Does it mean that a user has to be able to complete every possible task on a web site within three clicks? Does it mean every bit of content has to reside within three clicks of the homepage? Does it mean that I should be able to get anywhere, from anywhere, in single site within three clicks?

The way Porter’s client defines the “rule”, it’s that everything should be accessible within 3 clicks. Porter then goes on to explain why user testing doesn’t support the thesis that users will leave if they can’t complete their task within 3 clicks.

Maybe it’s just me, but not only did he get the thesis wrong, he assumed that an insignificant inverse correlation between clicks and task success (that is, he didn’t find that fewer clicks was better) indicated that the number of clicks didn’t matter all. Near as I can tell, the data supports no such conclusion.

What the data does show is that, even after 3 clicks, users continue to try and accomplish their task. OK, so Josh saw this too, and went on to look for a correlation between the number of clicks and user satisfaction. Again, he found no correlation. He says:

“…we should’ve seen the majority of successful
clickstreams ending around three clicks.”

WRONG! He’s completely missed the point: If the user is engaged within three clicks, then they don’t need to finish right away. Now granted, I don’t know what the tasks were in this test. But unless they were bombastically simple, there’s no way a user would finish in three clicks. But the fact that there was little correlation between the number of clicks and either task success or user satisfaction says nothing to me about the validity of the three-click rule. What it does say is that, at least in this test, users were well-enough engaged and not frustrated by the time they had clicked three times that it didn’t matter how many subsequent clicks it took them to complete their task.

There is one thing I agree with in this article: The Three-Click Rule is poorly stated, and poorly understood. When dealing with clients (especially ones who may know the “rule”, but not the theory behind it) I explain it this way: Users need to be engaged quickly, offered options that make sense, and appropriately guided into and through critical tasks. If, within three clicks of the arriving at the homepage, the user hasn’t begun to accomplish their goal, then the site design has failed.

Granted, it much more naunced. But I’d rather take the time to explain it than design an architecture for a site with thousands of pages, each of which is only “3 clicks away”.