Chapter 12: Ongoing Relationships

Overview

Most Web sites are used more than once. They continue to be useful to their customers over periods of months or years. People's use of a product and their relationship to it change with time. They grow accustomed to how it works; they learn what to focus on and what to ignore; and while their understanding of it deepens, they develop habits with it. If all goes well, loyalty and comfort increase rather than resentment and frustration.

In nearly all cases, you want people to get comfortable with your product and learn its more subtle facets. However, in order for the product to support long-term use, the development team should know how and when people's relationship to it and understanding of it changes. Most of the techniques in this book are not designed to support such understanding. They give an understanding of people's experience right now, a point on the curve. Knowing a point on the curve is valuable, but it doesn't define the curve. Knowing the shape of the curve can help you predict what people will want and help you design an appropriate way to experience it.

Thus you need techniques that help you understand the behavior and attitude changes that appear over time and the patterns embedded within those changes.

At first, the solution to this seems pretty straightforward: once you've recruited users one time, just invite them back on a regular basis and observe how their use and their views change. Unfortunately, it's not so simple. With the common methods—usability testing, focus groups, surveys—when you run the same kind of research with the same people, they start to lose their objectivity and the process starts to lose its validity.

Moreover, user research is generally done in an artificial, intense environment. The process of being in such an environment changes the way that people look at a product in their daily lives. They learn things about the product and themselves that they would not have known otherwise. Increased familiarity changes their ability to respond as they would have had they never been tested. Long-term feedback needs to be approached using different techniques from the regular feedback processes in order to compensate for this effect.

This chapter reviews several techniques—diaries, advisory boards, beta testing programs, and research telescoping—that provide an understanding into the long-term effects a product has on people's experiences, and how those experiences change with time.