March Madness and User Patterns

Share on Twitter March 22nd, 2008 | by David |

I’m running an office March Madness tournament primarily because I like to compete but also because I think its a good way to build up a little team cohesiveness amongst our very distributed organization.  This is the second year and I’ve now made the connection that this is a pretty good case study for some of the same user adoption problems we have internally and that others see when implementing solutions. If you are familiar with college basketball then the concept of a bracket is pretty basic. If you work on the web it shouldn’t be too hard to fill out a bracket online, right?

My "user base" is 54 professional, primarily college educated, people who use the Web on a daily basis. Its an international group so some may not be very familiar with college basketball and even for the US based audience some people just don’t care. Yeah I know. Weird, right? The graph below shows the results of my invitation to join a Yahoo managed Tournament Bracket contest.

 

A total of 37 people took the step to register. 6 of those users registered but didn’t make any picks, 3 only picked the first round, 5 failed to pick the championship game and 23 properly completed a bracket. Less than half of my audience completed an entry correctly. Here is some deeper analysis on each category of incomplete entries.

Registered but didn’t pick

I feel that these people fall into one of three categories.

  1. Never wanted to play but registered because they felt obligated to based on my invitation which referenced "supporting your team". I purposely was using peer pressure to try to get more people to sign up.
  2. Registered but other priorities came up which prevented them from selecting teams.
  3. Forgot to pick.

Only picked the 1st round

My guess is that this was done due to a lack of understanding about the workings of a bracket and the need to fill it out completely before the tournament starts. The Yahoo interface lets people do this, but there must not be any warning to alert people before they exit out of an incomplete bracket.

No championship pick

This exact same thing happened to the group last year when a handful of people, including me, didn’t make a championship pick. I was particularly conscious of it this year to ensure that I did it. I can’t describe it very well but there is something in the design of the bracket selection that makes it not uncommon to forget to pick the last and most important game from a scoring perspective.

My learning from these three groups of individuals with incomplete picks applies to my work at HP and also to my entrepreneurship efforts.

  • You can’t make people use a tool or process effectively that they don’t want to use and its probably a waste of time to try to coerce them.
  • People are busy and need reminders. If Yahoo had sent out reminders to the sets that had incomplete entries then I estimate that at least 11 more would have completed their brackets.
  • Tools and processes that have inconsistent steps or design are prone to error. The people that didn’t make a championship pick knew how to pick but something was different in that championship step that made it easy to make an error.

Didn’t sign up

Now on to the 17 people that didn’t register at all. Besides the overt peer pressure tactic I also let people know how easy it was to sign up and pick, sent out a couple of reminders, and offered my assistance to anyone that needed help. I spent a relatively large amount of time trying to get people to sign up.

I have some assumptions about why these people didn’t sign up.

  • Have no interest in basketball and didn’t see this activity benefiting team cohesiveness
  • Anti-social
  • Signing up may have indicated that the person had some extra time on their hands that could have better been used creating Powerpoint slides, sitting in meetings or filling out spreadsheets to route to people that will make decisions independent of the data in the spreadsheets. (let’s put a timer on that bullet before I edit it out)
  • Didn’t want to reach out for help to get started

What I pull from this group is that there is no solution that is going to work for 100% of the people. There are probably people that still have a problem with the 60 second minute and cars with 4 tires.

In summary, don’t waste your time trying to get the 17 signed up. Spend your time getting the 11 right that had interest but the solution failed them.