Filed under: Uncategorized
For those of you who enjoyed my quick blog post, The Free Ride Is Over, you might enjoy the full article that was just published in the E-Commerce Times.
Bottom line: in a tough economy where everyone is competing for the same shoppers, retailers need to differentiate on customer experience. It’s going to be win or lose.
Filed under: Bad UI | Tags: Bad Physical Interface, Bad UI, Experience Architecture, Experience Design, Jawbone, User Experience
I’ve been on a quest to find a satisfactory bluetooth headset for a few years now. Each one I buy is more expensive than the last and each one inevitiably disappoints. I recently went whole-hog and picked up a Jawbone, which is pretty much the most expensive one out there.
Jawbone Bluetooth Earpiece
Looks cool and wins the prize for fit and comfort.
But… it has an incredibly stupid flaw in its UI. Like all the other headsets I own, the Jawbone has a small number of buttons (in this case two) that do a large number of things. Not necessarily a problem in itself, especially because you usually only want to do one thing with your headset, namely speak to someone on it.
The Voice Activity Sensor must be in contact with your skin
However, the defining and differentiating feature of the Jawbone is its noise cancellation technology which requires that a little white rubber knob be in physical contact with your cheek. (Hence the name “Jawbone”). If the knob isn’t touching, you sound like you are talking with your head in a toilet (so I’m told). Again, not necessarily a problem because the ear loop and rubber earpiece tend to hold the unit in the right place, no matter how you move your head.
The problem is that the main button which does all the most important things, like answering the phone or hanging up the phone, is actually the entire outer face of the unit.
Essentially, they’ve designed the UI so that the two main affordances contradict each other. In order to talk and be heard, the white knob has to touch. To answer or hang up the phone, you push down (and not very hard mind you) on the outer ripply face of the unit.
You can guess how early conversations go:
Me: Hey you, how you doing?
You: Huh? I can’t hear you. You sound like your head is in a toilet!
Me: Ah – that’s because this little white knob isn’t touching my cheek. Let me just do the most natural thing that comes to mind to make it touch, like pushing on the outer face of the unit.
CLICK.
So yeah, after doing that a couple of times the Jawbone has trained me, like a Pavlovian dog, to hold the sides of the unit to adjust it so that the white knob touches my skin. I rarely hang up on people now. Presumably all the other buyers of the Jawbone (I see you all out there) have also been trained. And I basically still like the device and continue to use it.
But the designers made a bad decision here when they most certainly knew better.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Chase Paymentech, comScore, Cyber Monday, Cyber Tuesday, e-commerce, holiday shopping, metrics
Data is still trickling in on Cyber Monday (see my earlier post) but the Chase Paymentech’s Holiday Pulse Index showed a 12% decline in Average Order Value compared to last year resulting in a less than a 1% increase in total revenue, a number that seems rather at odds with the 14% increase reported by comScore. Chase’s index is derived from credit card clearing data from 25 of the top 150 US internet retailers, so may not be at all representative of the industry as a whole. On the other hand, they get to watch every single dollar coming across so for the 25 companies that comprise their index they presumably have extremely accurate data.
ComScore, by contrast, “watches” about two million internet users and aggregates their shopping behavior across all the sites they visit. So it’s quite possible that both sets of data are correct which could imply a shift in online spending towards the longer end of the tail. (Since comScore’s data is a superset of Chase’s, it would be really interesting to see if they actually tally for the 25 Chase retailers).
Back to the Chase data: as expected in the Year of the Discount, the transaction volume was up sharply, but price reductions ate up the gain. Not reflected in any of the numbers are “extra” discounts like free shipping, bonus gift certificates, etc, which are likely to erode profits further.
Here are the actual charts:
2008 Chase Paymentech Pulse Index (Cyber Week Sales)
2008 Chase Paymentech Pulse Index (Cyber Week Transactions)
Most interestingly, “Cyber Tuesday” had significantly higher sales than Monday as well as being sharply higher than any of the Cyber days from 2007. In fact Cyber Wednesday and Thursday also saw more sales than Monday. Perhaps more support for my earlier theory that it’s difficult to promote Cyber Monday simultaneously with the Thanksgiving weekend store promotions.
A member of our xA team, Annalisa Oswald, sent me this hilarious example of bad signage, courtesy our local Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority (i.e. subway & bus system):
Important Rule of Thumb for designers everywhere: If you have a sneaking suspicion that you’re doing something kinda boneheaded, you probably are. Don’t try to convince yourself that the bizarre thing you’re tying to do is actually inspired. It probably isn’t.
Annalisa’s picture reminded me of a counter-example of excellent signage that I ran across in Harvard Square a few years ago:
Clear, crisp, to-the-point, and utterly unambiguous. Not remotely compelling in terms of typography or layout (the letters aren’t even centered properly), but it definitely speaks loudly and clearly.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: broadband, Cyber Monday, e-commerce, holiday shopping
Cyber Monday wasn’t very cyber this year, according to this Wall Street Journal blog entry. Should online retailers panic? No, because Cyber Monday is a fiction and remains so. It’s never been the busiest online shopping day (the busiest is usually the last few days before Christmas when you can still count on getting something shipped in time), and I never bought the premise that lots of people are going to shop online the Monday after Thanksgiving because they have a broadband connection at work.
The broadband argument may have made sense a few years ago, but with home broadband penetration now at 75% of American Adult internet users we aren’t likely to see much of a bump. Also in a down economy, people may think twice about shopping when they are supposed to be working.
True, retailers ran some huge Cyber Monday discounts and promotions, and most are probably a bit disappointed, but I think the whole strategy needs a rethink. I suspect the Cyber Monday promotional blasts got lost in the noise of store-focused Thanksgiving advertising, resulting in a classic example of failing to have things both ways. You can’t drive shoppers into stores on Sunday and expect them to flock to the web on Monday. I think it would make more sense to start the holiday online promotions, especially free shipping, a week or two before Thanksgiving with a focus on improving usability and user experience so that shoppers keep coming back day after day.
Update: another Wall Street Journal article claims that Cyber Monday sales are up 15% from last year, according to data from comScore which also says that overall online holiday spending is still down 2%. Big question of course is how much discounting went on to drive traffic, but if comScore is right then obviously the marketing blitz worked. Don’t get me wrong: I think the idea of kick starting online holiday shopping is great, but I still think it would make more sense to start earlier, especially since the gifts have to be delivered.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: e-commerce, low hanging fruit, metrics, products viewed
I often get asked the question, “what is the lowest hanging fruit,” in terms of improving a given e-commerce web site. The answer obviously differs hugely from retailer to retailer – some seem to go out of there way to make their home and landing pages look like a Yahoo store, others make navigation more painful than abdominal surgery – but if I had to name a single universal bit of dangling deliciousness, I would point to the average number of products viewed per visit.
For virtually every online retailer, the products viewed number, like the overall site conversion rate, is just absurdly low. We count a product to be “viewed” when the shopper looks at some of the details of the product, so just seeing an image of the product doesn’t count. A typical average, even for a relatively good retailer, is two or three products viewed per visit.
Think about that for a second: you have a customer who typed a URL, clicked on a search engine link, responded to an email blast, or otherwise performed a proactive step to visit your site, and yet in all likelihood, she will actually look at no more than three products before leaving. Is it any wonder that overall conversion rates run 2 to 3 percent?
Clearly e-commerce sites have to find a way to put more products in front of shoppers in an easier and more compelling way. The passive electronic page metaphor just doesn’t cut it.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: demographics, e-commerce, online shopping, pew, Search Engine Marketing, SEM, SEO
Coming from a world where user experience is supposed mean everything, I am constantly struck by the paradox that some truly mediocre – if not downright appalling - online shopping sites (not naming names here) have nonetheless been pretty successful over the past several years. How can this be, and more importantly, is this going to continue? Does user experience really not matter?
I think I found some answers to these questions in this 2008 Report from the Pew Internet and American Life project. I really like the Pew reports because they are commercially unbiased – they have no interest in the outcome of their studies one way or the other. They also seem to do a pretty rigorous job in running their studies which are based on doing extensive nation-wide telephone surveys. In other words, there are good reasons to believe that their numbers are accurate.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Allurent, Design, Experience Architecture, Experience Design, User Experience
So, what the heck is “Experience Architecture?”
The name came out of my attempt to get rid of the word “design” in what we do when we figure out what a new shopping experience should be like, how it should behave, what it should try to accomplish, what its emotional impact should be, etc, etc, etc. The fact that we used to call the group of people who do this “Allurent Design” made this this task kinda challenging.
The problem with the D-word is that a lot of people seem to have the impression that “Designers” will only go so far in terms of getting their hands dirty in the actual blood and guts of really making an application work, and no further. Designers do Graphic Design, User Interface Design, even User Experience Design, but there’s an assumption out there that when you move beyond static mockups and wireframes, there’s a complete handoff to a different set of skills. The reality, at least in Allurent, is that our “designers” follow their visions all the way through from gathering business requirements to prototyping to launch and beyond. There is, of course, a whole slew of other highly talented project leaders, coders, graphic artists, copy writers, QA specialists, analytics gurus, etc. that team together to launch a new and innovative application, but there’s no conceptual line in the sand.
