Are you sure? How sure?

I have the privilige to act as chairman for a young company http://www.zef.fi/en/home/ The company's WHY - mission - is very clear: helping people to make decisions - better decisions - all over the place.

There is an exponentially growing need for this as the information overflow continues to grow exponentially. So does the number of devices, apps and solutions meant to make it easier. All taken together means less time for any one thing - and this again drives changes in the plastic brain (as eminently pictured in Kit Yarrow's Decoding the new Consumer Mind). This new brain that marketeers, politicians and all communicators are addressing does not any more accept anything long-winding, complicated or boring. Still - far too often - businesses are responding to too much content by creating more content.

The answer to the dilemma is as such pretty obvious: be at the right place, at the right time with the right solution., in the right device(s) - with utter simplicity and clarity. If you can be playful and fun much is won. Gamification is not bad either.

But you should avoid the too often Yes/no or thumb up/thumb down questions. This is often tendentious and even outright dangerous (as if there would always be a 100pct right or wrong choice) for the organisation asking the question and can be very unpleasant for the customer/member/citizen.

In ZEF this has been addressed in evalution, testing, voting and online buying services with 1) a "How-sure-are-you?" slider (do not use 1-5 or numbers in the first place!),

2) by using the slider horizontally for how-bad>how good and vertically for how important it also highlights aspects that are less important to mend and

3) the ZScoring method (patented) that eliminates the differences between answers (in both dimensions) from perfectionists and ordinary people, optimists and pessimists, cultural differencies between regions etc. An average of answers -  without first eliminating different use of measures - is meaningless (as users mean different things with the same slider position or numbeer and same things with different positions) -  and at worst a base for the wrong action. 

For all sorts of organisations it is all about understanding and communicating. The danger is that information overflow can lead to both wrong, late or hectic corporate decisions. Needless to say that banks have ample space for improvements here.