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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Take a look at this chart from the report:

Percentage of Adult Americans Who Have Ever Purchased Online

In 2000, only 22% of American adults had ever purchased a product online. By 2006, that number grew to 50%. Amazingly enough the percentage actually shrinks to 49% in 2007, indicating that the growth of new online shoppers did not keep pace with the growth of population. 

What this data tells me is that over the past eight years, we’ve had a massive influx of new online shoppers — about sixty-five million American adults — which has been fueling the massive growth of e-commerce. This has been a huge tidal wave that has lifted a lot of boats, and has benefited the biggest retail brands the most, since new shoppers tend to shop at retailers that they already know from their stores and catalogs. It’s been a free ride for a lot of sites, even the ones with terrible user experiences.

Now you might think that having reached only half of America today, we have another eight years of free ride ahead, but the negative growth between 2006 and 2007 should give you considerable pause. You should also note that of the half of the country who have yet to make an internet purchase, fully half of them aren’t even on the internet at all and probably do not own a computer.

The net-net here is that sometime in the not too distant future, the following statement will be more or less true: everyone who is going to shop online is already shopping online. For practical purposes, that may already be the case today. Patti Freeman Evans of Jupiter/Forrester has been writing about this for years!

I think that insight answers my second question. As the growth of new online shoppers slows and even grinds to a halt, as it appears to be doing, the e-commerce dynamic will shift from sucking in a share of new shoppers (for example, through Search Engine Marketing / Optimization) to retaining loyal customers. Customer retention has a lot of dimensions, but fundamentally it boils down to how the customer is treated throughout the entire series of interactions from landing page to order confirmation.

In other words, user experience is suddenly going to matter more than anything.

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.

The other problem with “Design” is that a lot of our clients already have an internal design team or agency of record that handles branding, logos, and imagery, and calling ourselves a design group made their designers wonder if we were going to be competing with them in some way. In fact, we usually end up relying hugely on existing designers and agencies so that our new experiences fit seamlessly within the existing site. 

We feel that “Experience Architecture” captures more of the essence of what we do… We like to do a thought exercise when we are creating a new experience of whether shoppers would recognize the application if we replaced all the images and logos with blank “X’s.” I.e. would you know you were using Borders’ magic shelf if you never saw the word “Borders” or saw any books? We focus on the experience itself: how it feels, how the functionality is exposed, what it “says”, what it accomplishes for our client, and what’s changes in a shopper’s mind between when she started and when she finished. It’s “design” in the broader sense of the word, but closer to “architecture” when you mentally separate the way something works and how it’s built from its skin.

Plus we think “xA” will make a cool logo… Too bad we no longer have a design group!