The Guess Who Principle

Ady Borkala
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

Remember the game we used to play as kids? Guess Who. I used to often use the concept for problem solving — eliminate the largest number of possible causes with the fewest number of tests to hone in on the root cause.

I was recently involved in some design research where we had a long list of questions that a customer had to work through in an application form. The initial order of questions were really based around how those questions were asked when face to face with a customer, and were based around the system that the answers were being entered into, which were most likely just based around some business logic of what was most important to the business when that system was created.

Through testing the questions with customers, it was obvious that some questions that we were asking late in the journey, could have created a better outcome if they’d been asked much earlier. It got me thinking back to how I’d previously used the logical approach to Guess Who, and realised how that principle could easily be used to consider which questions we asked earlier in an application form.

An example

Let’s imagine that one of our questions in an application form, typically a couple of pages deep into the form, for a complex financial product was about your employment status. We know that if our customer is self employed, we need them to come and talk to us to give them a better chance of being accepted for our products as we need to have a clearer understanding of their unique financial situation. They’ve just spent 10 minutes filling out forms to get to this question and typically you’d see on the next screen a message along the lines of “sorry, but because you’re self-employed, we need you to book and appointment with and advisor so that we can complete your application” — how annoying.

What if instead, we were able to ask this question sooner in the journey so that the only applicants continuing with the application were those who had more of a chance of reaching the end / being approved for the application.

Better still

Rather than apologising to a potential customer that they can’t complete their application online if they did tell you they were self-employed, why not make them feel special, and maybe create a more exclusive feeling to the experience they’ll get: “We know how unique and complex your situation can be. We’ve been helping self-employed people like you apply for additional finances for over 40 years and we’d love to help you too. Let’s book an appointment for you with an expert in our specialist support team…”

In practice

As with the game, there’s not really a perfect route, and in the real world, every situation you design for will be different to another. For me, I find having this principle to hand, helps me remember to consider and design the order of your journey to give some people a quick escape route if your journey isn’t right for them, or you need them to go into another route through your journey. As with anything else you design, it’s also really important to test the routes you create to try and find the optimum journey that suits your visitors/customers.

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