For those readers of this blog who don’t happen to read the Boston Globe I’d like to share a fascinating link: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full

The article is about how readers of political articles, when faced with the corrected facts about the article they’ve read, actually become more adamant and entrenched in their misinformed views rather than less as one might expect. Far from admitting defeat, they insist they’re right. Human nature makes us incredibly unwilling to admit we’re wrong.

The problem is known as “backfire”. No one yet knows why backfire happens. It’s pretty strange. And, as with most of the articles and stories I read, I got to wondering how this might apply to web development.

Anyone who’s been in a client-facing role in web design or development, or any other creative industry I imagine, will have met at least one client who is insistent that they know best because they’ve been misinformed by an article, a friend or a previous developer. It’s especially prevalent in the field of Search Engine Optimisation. There are many, many myths about what effects change in your website’s ranking, and persuading a client that what they think is good for their site is actually quite harmful can be a considerable challenge.

Presenting a clear and concise set of web and search analytics results that show how a change has made a positive improvement to the website, either in terms of search traffic, conversion ratio, or customer feedback doesn’t always lead to the client agreeing that the change should stay. The “knowledge” that the client is working from trumps the numbers in front of them in apparently indisputable black and white.

The answers to the issue of client knowledge backfire are given in the article – the direct, blunt approach of flatly refusing to accept that the client is right (because they’re not) while repeating the evidence to them might get through. Alternatively, complimenting the site and highlighting the positive aspects before presenting the aspect that’s backfiring might work instead. It depends on the client. What’s clear though, from my experience and from the literature about the problem of backfire in other aspects of life, is that simply giving a client the facts and expecting them to come to the ‘obvious’ conclusion isn’t always going to work.