Engage-Digital

Today we have more choice than ever before. More choice in almost anything we can think of to consume and this is generally regarded as a good thing.

I’m of an age in which my parents were alive during the Second World War and they remember rationing and less choice. The mantra in the UK at that time was “mend and make do”, something that has been dusted off recently as we all struggle with the harshest economic climate since the First World War. Back then being paralysed by choice wasn’t an issue.

The web has had a very significant impact on the level of choice over the last 15 years or so. We have more choice than we know what to do with across such huge range of areas from the media we consume, to the way we search for places to live and holidays to go on, entertainment and means of communicating with other people.

Given the human imagination it would be fair to assume that our capacity to absorb choice would be almost unlimited; they say “if you can think it, it’s probably been done”. Amend that to “if you can think it, it’s probably been done and you can find out about it on the web”. As a group the human capacity for choice is practically unlimited but individually, I think not.

So Google has played a key role in all of this. It’s mission statement being to.. “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Whether it’s organised it or not is another matter but it has certainly made it much more accessible.

What it means for the retailer

Dial that back now and consider the much smaller universe of an online store. One of the benefits of ecommerce is the lower costs of doing business. These come about as a result of lower overheads due to stock being held in cheap warehouses in business parks and on trading estates instead of held on more expensive shop floors. That also means there’s a lot more space available – Amazon’s warehouses are enormous – and that in turn means a huge selection of stock that can be sold through the online store. So we come back to ever increasing choice for the consumer and how to wade through it especially if you’re shopping online.

What it means for the punter

The fact is, if you’ve decided take up running you’ll probably want a pair of running shoes but if you arrive in an online store and you’re presented with a choice of over 200 different pairs of shoes, being faced with such a huge range may actually be more of a hindrance than a help; back to the paralyzing  tyranny of choice. The end result for the retailer being a no sale situation.

Just as Google has tried to do with the world’s information the key for the retailer is to organise and make stock more easily accessible. More than anything else this will help the customer, more than beautiful product shots,  clever copy or fancy widgets and tools, if a customer can’t find what s/he’s looking for and narrow it down to a manageable choice then there is no deal.

What it means for the website’s store developer

Success means that navigation and organization are co-dependent. Tools like Omniture’s Merchandising, Fredhopper, Endecca or Celebros will all help with both organisation and narrowing down the product search through the mechanisms of both free text search and more importantly guided navigation but there is still the most important job to be done of categorising and tagging products so they can be easily filtered by the customer using these tools.

The point here is not at all about the technology but about the need to create a framework which will do as much of the decision making for the customer as possible with the end result that the final decision, the one to buy, is as simple and straight forward as can be.

I may get shot (down in flames) for writing this post.

Web analytics is not just about data, this is well documented and blogged by far greater minds than mine – so I won’t get shot for that I hope! Web analytics is simply the engine behind driving better performance online. Better performance online for most organisations that actually engage in web analytics is usually about driving more revenue and improving cost efficiencies- and of course improving conversion.

99% of companies in the UK are SMBs and I think this is the great challenge for the web analytics industry. Many SMBs have websites and many of those websites perform a function, but the hard reality is that amazingly they don’t have the same size budgets as the average blue chip fortune 1000. They still need to invest to improve performance so they must approach their performance optimisation from a different perspective.

Usability is arguably a part of web analytics (2.0 as it has been labelled). There are many great usability experts out there and several different ways of approaching usability; these range from individual lab based usability tests, remote sample based usability tests using services such as Ethnio to journey replay solutions like Tealeaf.

To be clear, after looking at click-stream data and having identified where a problem might lie, if usability is what’s needed to unearth the truth then the methods just mentioned should be the preferred route; but they aren’t cheap.

A more cost efficient option would be to use a click based heat mapping product such as ClickDensity or CrazyEgg. These are not new products, they’ve been around for a while and they’re like click maps on steroids. They record clicks regardless of the presence of a link or not. They show the results either as actual clicks on the part of the page where the click was made or aggregated as a heat map. The advantage here is that where a standard link overlay will only record a click if it occurs on a link (assuming the tag is set properly) these tools will record click activity regardless. In other words, if a visitor reaches a page and attempts to click on something that looks like a link but isn’t, it will be recorded and show up.

So how do you get the most out of these tools in 5 ½ steps?

1. Assume a customer journey based on a task – making a purchase or signing up to an email
2. Replicate the customer journey as best as possible using a funnel or scenario in your analytics tool
   • Start with the most popular entry page
3. Allow enough data to collect
4. Identify main points of attrition (try and think why this might be happening i,e, form a hypothesis for each page where there is considerable drop off)
5. Look at the offending page using the heat mapping tool. The heat map will of course only show where your users have clicked but because it records every click there may be some surprises regarding where activity has and has not occurred and this could lead to action resulting in improved performance. For example there may be a high volume of clicks on a piece of text which has been mistaken for a link, this is potentially lost traffic and could go some way to explaining the drop off.

Any tweaks to the page that are implemented can subsequently be A/B tested to verify performance.

Cons

• Again, I should state, this is not the real deal in usability circles (don’t shoot!)
• You can’t talk to the people viewing the page and you can’t hear their thoughts as they navigate the page
• You can’t see cursor movements
• You can’t run the test with users instructed to carry out specific tasks

Pros

• For the budget conscious business it is much cheaper and more cost efficient. Even for large organisations it is a good practice
• The sample size includes everybody that interacts with a given page
• You can run A/B tests using these tools and compare your results instantly and run the best performing page.

This final point is perhaps the crux of it. The objective here is to amend the page design so that it makes life easier for the visitor and thereby unblocks the path to customer satisfaction.

This post has been written in the hope that it will prompt the more budget conscious business to think about how they can approach usability from a standing start. It’s not an attempt to provide a definition.

Please feel free to comment with your own thoughts and experiences.