Trigger words versus Customer Carewords

Posted October 25th, 2008 by David Hamill

I was discussing Gerry McGovern with a friend recently. We both like the way he writes about good web content. However my friend felt that he couldn’t really see a difference between Customer Carewords and Jared Spool’s trigger words. They are both similar I agree, but I think there are differences. I’ll attempt to describe these differences the way I see them. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong.

The importance of vocabulary

It’s important to use the same words as your users on your website. They often use different words from you and probably recognise a fraction of the terms and abbreviations you use on a daily basis.

This is not only important for writing passages of text but also for way finding on your site. Good links and headers use the same words that users are thinking when they need to use them. Trigger words and Customer Carewords are based on this fact. “Words drive action” as Gerry McGovern puts it.

Trigger words

In 2004 Jared Spool wrote about trigger words. He argued that users were more likely to find what they are looking for when a site used exactly the same words they use to describe their goals. These words trigger a response because they match the words in users’ heads.

Finding your site’s trigger words

Trigger words can be found by talking to users. One suggestion Jared made was to find trigger words during usability testing. You can identify them by asking target users to describe their needs and goals before they have seen the website. You can then compare the words they use to the equivalents used on the website.

You can also use your search logs to find trigger words. Spool found that in tests, people were more likely to use site search when the website did not use the trigger words. When they used site search they typed the same trigger words they had mentioned before they had seen the site.

Customer Carewords

Gerry McGovern discusses Customer Carewords in his book Killer Web Content. (It’s a good book but the formatting of the text makes it difficult to read in places.) Customer Carewords is Gerry McGovern’s methodology for finding two things:

• The things that are most important to a website’s users.
• The words they use to describe those things.

The methodology for doing this is fairly simple. Create a long list of potential carewords and ask lots of your target users to choose the ten things that are most important to them. OK it’s slightly more involved than this. But I need to condense an entire chapter into one sentence. The list you provide them with contains lots of alternative terms for the same things. So you could have a hundred or so items in total.

In your results you find that a small number of potential carewords are chosen far more frequently than the other words. McGovern argues that 5% of your website delivers 25% of it’s value. This 5% surfaces in the Customer Carewords methodology and he calls it the ‘Long Neck’.

So what’s the difference?

The first difference between the two concepts is that trigger words do not help you prioritise, they just give you the correct words to use. However this isn’t what I’m trying to compare. I’m sure Jared Spool understands task priorities and uses other techniques to find them. I want to compare carewords to the trigger words.

User-generated versus user-selected

For me the trigger words are slightly stronger than the carewords. This is because they are generated by the user. They are found by inspecting search logs or through open discussion during usability tests. The words are a by-product of a conversation or a site search. No suggestions are made and the user is unaffected by the fact that you are noting the words they use. They don’t know it’s happening.

Customer Carewords however are selected from a list of pre-defined terms. I think that this can have an impact on the words chosen. McGovern himself admits as much in his book. In one study he carried out on a travel site, ‘special offers’ received twice as high a score as ‘deals’. So by his methodology ‘special offers’ was the strongest careword. However he found that there were 76,238 internet searches made monthly in the U.S. for ‘vacation deals’ or ‘travel deals’. In the same period there were just 46 searches for ‘vacation special offers’ or ‘travel special offers’.

It seems to me that if you place importance on the words by specifically asking for them, you influence the results. In a discussion, the respondents from McGovern’s study may have innocently said ‘deals’ numerous times. But when asked to choose a word, they chose ‘special offers’. So ‘deals’ is the trigger word and ‘special offers’ are the carewords.

So why did this happen? McGovern’s response is “the words people search with may not always be those they like to see when they visit a website“. This is based on the actual respondents’ justifications for their actions. My opinion is that their own justification can be biased by ego.

Interestingly McGovern leaves this question unanswered. He doesn’t say which option was the one he took. Perhaps he chose the trigger word?

Customer Care Trigger Words

I think you can merge both exercises and just prioritise the words that users provide spontaneously. So you override carewords that are contradicted by trigger words.

Carrying out Gerry McGovern’s Customer Carewords methodology will help you find out what’s important on your website. You can then cross-check your customer carewords against their trigger word equivelants. Check your search logs and note the words that usability testing participants use by interviewing them before they see the website. If the trigger words don’t match the carewords then use the trigger words.

Doing so will let you know what information your users prioritise. You’ll also be able to use their vocabulary when providing it.

Tags: Gerry McGovern, Jared Spool, navigation, trigger words, Usability testing, web writing