A friend recently asked me to test Aardvark (vark.com) advice network (not to be confused with the amazing Firefox Aardvark extension, the developer’s best friend). Essentially, you upload all sorts of information about yourself, your knowledge and interests, and somehow it connects you with friends of friends. When they have a question, it sends you an email, chat or SMS message. It may be that I’m just simply not in their target audience, so some of my thoughts may be way off base, but I do think that vark.com is missing the boat on some of the basic prerequisites for a social networking site. They say they do a lot of user testing, so they must have tested all this, but it seems like there’s a lot of testing yet to be done.
The Audience Problem
Like I say, not sure how much my thoughts are worth, since clearly they’re aiming at another audience. As in: I don’t do chat, IM, text messaging or any of that. I have long since trained my friends that I don’t often answer emails the same day I receive them (and long before I heard of Tim Ferris). The only immediate response thing I do is phone and skype and I only give my skype address out to family and a few friends and try to limit that. So it’s a bit hard for me to see how I would participate in Aardvark.
Conceptual level. The Big Idea level….
Here’s where they fail to make the sale to me and once they fail to make this sale, it’s an uphill battle for them to build trust through the rest of the process. The thing that is difficult for me to get around is that in my view there are personal and impersonal channels of communication.
- Personal: email, chat, skype, Facebook personal messaging, Twitter direct messagings. These are all messages from someone to me specifically and nobody else.
- Impersonal: Twitter posts, forums, Facebook wall, etc. These are messages that go from someone to the wide wide world. They’re not to me personally and uniquely.
I try to keep my personal channels free from impersonal messages. I have spamcatcher email addresses I use for things that blur the line, such as newsletters, mailing lists, signing up for accounts with BestBuy, Amazon and such. It strikes me that Aardvark is trying to use a personal channel (chat, email) to deliver an impersonal message. Yes, it is personalized — I only get messages that are supposed to be appropriate to me — but not personal, that is only to me. So that’s an adoption hurdle for me just as a concept.
The Registration Problem
They could overcome the personal/impersonal problem by using the registration process to allay fears and make the sale, but in my opinion, they do the opposite. Aardvark actually asks for quite a bit of information just to get started. I’m always skeptical of that and if I’m going to give away a lot of personal information about where I live and what I like, information that marketers will kill for (or worse yet, pay for). To give away all that information, it needs to meet one of two conditions, and preferably both:
- I need it. I may be a little uneasy about a site, but they have something that I absolutely need. I can’t do without it or I don’t want to do without it. They’re asking for personal details, but they’re offering something of great value.
- I trust them. There are a few sites that I trust implicitly with my information. I don’t give Amazon more than I have to, and they have only my spam catcher email address, but over the years they’ve built up great trust by not abusing my information. Often not-for-profits ask me to trust them because they have a great mission and are inherently good. Just like the government, if you catch my meaning. And if you don’t catch my meaning, that is to say that the government has been a poor steward of my privacy lately.
Typically, when I sign up for a new service that I don’t necessarily trust, I start by giving a spam catcher address and often a fake name (and almost always a fake birth date). If they want personally identifiable information,they need to build my trust either before, during or after the registration process.
I actually went all the way through the Aardvark registration process because I was asked by a friend to test it. I found it much too intrusive for a site that I had never heard of and knew little about. They have detailed information on how it works in theory, but nothing at all on what happens with my data, who can see it, and what control I would have over contact from people I know and don’t know.
An example
And then there are parts that I didn’t do anyway, even if invited by my friend…. Example: in general, I block all Facebook apps. I find all those snowballs fights, mafia, pirate stuff absurd and just a distraction to keeping in touch with family and friends. And I don’t collect Facebook friends. I try to keep it a personal channel as much as possible. If you we don’t have personal history together, you’re not on my Facebook list. When Aardvark offers to connect to Facebook, it’s still not clear to me exactly what’s going to happen, how it’s going to show up on Facebook, what my friends will see, and what exactly my benefit is. Ideally, exactly next to the Facebook connect button there should be a "what’s this?" or "how this works" link to a video that shows how it shows up in Facebook, what my friends will see, what benefits it offers and what hassles, if any, it imposes on my life. For me Facebook is a semi-personal channel and and I don’t want to annoy my friends and family that I keep in touch with via Facebook. Before I connect other data, I need to know that it won’t annoy my friends or affect my reputation.
A Broken Interface Erodes Trust
If I start setup, I can’t get to the welcome/home page any more. At least I couldn’t figure out how. It always brings me to the last spot I was in during setup like a pitbull that won’t let go. Clicking on the Aardvark at the top should always take me to the home page (a web interface standard that must not be broken), but it took me to the Facebook Connect page. But I’m not on Facebook (though I am). So then it took me to the Add Categories page. But do I want to add categories? Again, are my categories and demographic info being shared with marketers or just connecting me with friends? This type of behavior once again erodes trust. It makes the user (at least this user) feel trapped.
A recommendation
Think about every possible hesitation and catch me exactly at my hesitation point, like the suggestion to have an explanation about effects on privacy and such right next to the Facebook Connect button. I know of marketers who say they get much higher conversions when they have a popup link to their privacy policy right on the registration or order form, for example. That would help a lot.
Aardvark needs to think a bit more about the registration process if they want easy adoption beyond social networking true believers: what trust and social proof barriers might people perceive, figure out what the choke points are by keeping track of exactly where people abandon the process, figure out why, and take steps to fix it.
Online, trust is everything. In person, we have the idea that if something goes truly bad, we can go down to the business or local animal shelter or whatever and picket, protest, call the police, walk in with a lawyer. It doesn’t mean I trust those businesses. They often ask for a phone number at transaction time and I simply say no. But I do have the assurance that I can come down and find these people.
Trust is harder to build online and must be cultivated carefully and persistently at every possible occasion. There is no such thing as paying too much attention to building trust, and Aardvark needs to pay more attention.
