Personality psychology can change how you think about product communication improvements

I recently worked with a product team focused on communication. As we were thinking through how product notifications fit in to the experience of communicating information, I was reminded of a framework from Personality Psychology called the Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM; Funder, 1995).

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Background

According to the RAM, four checkpoints all have to occur for an accurate personality judgement to occur. If any step fails, you won’t have an accurate judgement of someone’s personality.

Here’s an example using the trait of friendliness. My first day at work, I hope to find out whether my manager is friendly by observing his behavior. I meet my manager, who smiles widely, says how excited he is for me to be there, and asks if I need anything. I decide that my manager is friendly. My manager actually is a friendly person, and thus I have made an accurate judgement of personality because each of the following four steps have occurred.

1. Relevance: My manager’s behavior (smiling, greeting) was relevant to the trait (friendliness).
2. Availability: The behavior was available for me to observe.
3. Detection: I noticed the behavior.
4. Utilization: I correctly attributed the behavior to the trait.

There are a number of ways for the judgement to “fail” at each step.

1. Relevance fail: My manager could have put on a neutral smile, given me a professional handshake, and merely said, “nice to meet you.” This behavior would have told me that he is polite, but wouldn’t have been relevant to the trait of friendliness.
2. Availability: If my manager was in meetings all day, I may never have had the opportunity to observe the behavior.
3. Detection: Perhaps I didn’t realize that the person smiling and greeting me was my manager.
4. Utilization: If my manager behaves in a friendly manner (relevance), I am around to see the behavior (availability), I notice the behavior (detection) but I decide that my manager is a phony person and not actually friendly, then I have failed to correctly utilize the information (because in reality, my manager is very friendly).

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Applying the RAM to communication

What links successful personality judgments and successful communications? Both have an end goal that can be thwarted at several stages, although the flow of information travels in opposite directions. Instead of ingesting information to make a judgment, one instead shares information in order for a successful communication to occur.

The following scenario uses Microsoft Teams as an example. I need to let the book club know what book we’ve selected to read next month. I share the announcement in the Book Club channel, and after a few hours I see that all the book clubbers have “liked” the post. By the next book club meeting, everyone has read the right book.

1. Relevance: I posted in the Book Club channel, so only people interested in the book club would get the message.

2. Availability: Everyone on our team has access to the Book Club channel.

3. Detection: Everyone who wanted to participate in the book club saw the post. I knew they had seen it because they “liked” the post.

4. Utilization: The book clubbers all read the same book because of the information provided in the announcement.

Again, each step presents opportunity for communication to fail.

1. Relevance fail: If I posted in a company-wide channel, it wouldn’t have been a wholly successful communication because I would have shared irrelevant information with hundreds of coworkers.
2. Availability fail: If a new coworker joined our team but had not yet been added to the Book Club channel, the information would not be available to them.
3. Detection fail: If the book clubbers didn’t have notifications set up for the Book Club channel, they likely would not see the announcement. Conversely, if they had notifications pouring in from dozens of channels, they could miss the book club announcement.
4. Utilization fail: If someone saw the notification and then went on to read a different book with a similar title by mistake, then they would not have utilized the information correctly.

The Realistic Accuracy Model applied to communication

Using the RAM to enhance product communication

Here’s how we’ve applied the RAM to improve communication within Buildertrend, a construction project management software with a web version and mobile app.

Over a million users rely on Buildertrend to manage the building process from start to finish. This includes project managers, homeowners, field crew, superintendents, accountants, etc.; each of them needs the right information at the right time in order to do their job correctly. A failed communication could affect the bottom line or even the safety of personnel, not to mention cause endless frustration. Using the RAM to scrutinize our product guided us toward the right questions and the best solutions for our users.

Horizontal rectangular tiling, originally designed to beautify New York subway stations, has become a design classic. Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

For example, a homeowner hires a remodeling company to update their kitchen. The homeowner initially chooses black grout for the subway tile backsplash, but later they decide on white grout instead. The homeowner opens Buildertrend to communicate this information to the project manager.

Relevance: Is it clear where the homeowner should make this kind of request? Is the appropriate experience for this kind of communication intuitively apparent, or is it something that the remodeler has to explain to the homeowner?

Availability: Does the project manager’s viewing permissions allow them to see the request from the homeowner? Are there any settings that may prevent them from viewing the request? If multiple people have access to the request, is it clear who the intended recipient is?

Detection: How will the project manager find the homeowner’s request? Do they need to search for it? Will they get a notification? What kind of notification: push, e-mail, text, carrier pigeon? How will they determine the level of urgency of this notification? How will the homeowner know that their request has been seen?

Utilization: How can the software facilitate the next steps that the project manager needs to take? What keeps this request from getting lost among all the moving parts of the build? How will the homeowner and other users know that the request has been appropriately handled?

Each of these stages could have dozens more questions to consider. For instance, how might the answer to each question change for mobile app versus web users? Additionally, you could walk through each step through the eyes of a different persona. What does relevance, availability, detection, and utilization mean for Amelia the homeowner? What does it mean for Alex the project manager? For the purchasing coordinator in the office? For the crew’s go-to tile installer?

Fitting the RAM into your research framework

There may come a point when all of these questions become overwhelming, especially the ones that aren’t easy to answer. The beauty of research, though, is having multiple sources of data from which to draw conclusions.

Again, personality psychology provides an elegant comparison, this time using the concept of convergent validity or whether multiple pieces of evidence point to the same conclusion. Let’s go back to the example of my friendly manager. Perhaps I incorrectly judged him as unfriendly during our first meeting. There are still other ways to determine if he is or isn’t friendly. I could ask other coworkers. I could find a way to sneakily administer a friendliness personality test. I could read his Twitter feed. I could observe how he acts around others. If, time after time, the results indicate (i.e., converge around the fact) that he is friendly, then he probably is friendly.

In his textbook The Personality Puzzle, David Funder (who came up with the RAM) relates convergent validity to the duck test: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. When it comes to potential issues with your product, if the RAM suggests its a problem, the stakeholders think it’s a problem, the usage data point to a problem, and the users say it’s a problem…you’ve probably got a problem.

The mandarin duck (Aix galericulata) is found predominantly in Western Europe and East Asia, where it originates. Ornithological enthusiasts from other parts of the word may need to use the “duck test” to determine if this bird is, in fact, a duck. Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash

The questions that you derive from the RAM are a good starting point, but they’re not the only thing you should investigate. Instead of tackling them one by one, see which questions align with what you’re hearing from users. Then look for trends in any quantitative data that you have. Talk to folks in your company who are familiar with the product and who talk to users regularly. Chances are, you’ll start to hear the same things over and over. Focus your efforts there, and user-aligned product improvements are sure to follow.

Catie Brown is a User Researcher at Buildertrend with a background in psychological research and teaching.