Adopting low effort user engagement

Low effort interactions are now gaining traction within the user journey.

As the web has developed, a lot of effort and research has gone into how to interact with people who visit your website - whether it be the public, your members or your customers. 

Up until the last couple of years much of this had to do with quantity - providing as many opportunities as you could to interact with people. For example, running conferences, seminars, newsletters, Facebook Pages, Twitter and so on.

But the advent of new disciplines such as User Interface design (UI Design) and research into the user experience show that the quality of interaction is more important. In other words user experiences with organisations can often have a negative impact, driving down perceived value and making them actually feel bad about you.

Sue Froggatt (in our view the go-to person for membership training) has an excellent book Managing the Membership Experience where she describes the need for “low effort” interactions.

For example imagine you are recruiting volunteers. If one were to take an organisation-centric view of this one might organise an open evening and invite prospective volunteers to that. The problem here is it takes a lot of effort - and comitment - on the part of the prospect to do that. A user-centric approach might be to have a conversation with the prospect at a time that suits them. This of course might not suit the organisation but it shows already that you are placing a high value on recruitming volunteers and requires very low effort on their behalf.

Identifying low effort opportunities is the subject of another post.