A survey of 22,000 retail shoppers shows that visitors who use a site’s search function convert at three times the rate of visitors who browse. Site search can be a powerful engine for conversion – if it works effectively. How good is your site search?

Join us for our webinette to discover more about diagnosing and rectifying findability issues related to site search.

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The last 3 installments of our articles have discussed how and what people are purchasing based on the ‘like’ of friend, as informed by our social media survey results of October 2011. Within that, our respondents have indicated that a friend’s ‘like’ has a positive effect.  In fact, 42% of respondents reported they made a purchase of that ‘liked’ product and an additional 32% at least considered (or checked out) the product, as shown in the chart below.

Let’s round out the discussion by switching gears and looking at the flip side. Let’s talk about the 26% of survey respondents that did not make a purchase or even consider the purchase of a product based on the ‘like’ of a friend.

When this 26% was asked to select all reasons they did not purchase or consider a purchase based on the ‘like’ of a friend, the two top reasons were 1) more facts were needed about the product—not just opinion, and 2) social media is used only for personal reasons and not to view ads for products or merchants. This applied across all age, gender and income levels.

However, regardless of reasons for not buying, most respondents still indicated they were somewhat positively influenced by their friends ‘like’ as shown in the graph below.

While there may not be any one thing you can do about the respondents who didn’t buy because they only use social media for personal reasons, there may be something you can do about those who need more facts about the product before purchasing.

In addition to making sure your site displays detailed product information, consider integrating information from product review sites like CNET.com (pictured below) that feature ‘likes’ as well as reviews by consumers and experts.

The inclusion of or ability to easily access reviews is also supported by the feedback we have received from participants in many of our lab based studies. They have said that having an unbiased review from an expert or the ability to read through negative and positive reviews by consumers was very helpful in making a purchasing decision.

While some companies worry about exposing consumers to negative reviews about their products, participants in our lab studies have made it clear that in most cases, one “great” review or one “horrible” review does not sway them, but looking at multiple reviews (positive, negative, neutral etc.) helps them gain a better understanding of the product as a whole.

In fact, while users highly valued consumer reviews, most acknowledged that at times they suspected some reviews might be skewed in support of the product, regardless of its actual quality, or conversely, by those who had a vendetta against the company or product.  The bottom line, viewing a wide range of opinions was important to them.

Additionally, many participants in our lab studies indicated that if product reviews are not available on the website, they will leave the website to read product reviews from other websites until they feel certain about the purchase.

So if your social media campaign has been successful and a consumer has been led to a product on your website based on the ‘like’ of friend, encourage this 32% (as referenced in our previous article) to stay and buy.  Give them the tools (detailed product information and reviews) to make a purchasing decision on your website and complete the sale.

As our research shows (based on the results of our social media survey and the data gathered from lab participants), providing a one-stop shopping experience that includes social media and reviews may be the ticket to increased sales and conversion.

To create a successful social media campaign, ensure that research is done with your target market to determine the best use of your time and money in this realm.  Implementation of social media is shown to increase sales; make sure your social media campaign is doing the same for you.

–Katie Mauck, Senior Usability Analyst

Overall, and illustrated below, the top four categories of purchased products based on the ‘like’ of a friend were 1) Books, movies, music, games, 2) Entertainment, restaurants and attractions, 3) Grocery, health and beauty, 4) Electronics and computers.

Digging deeper into this data gleaned some interesting findings. Not surprisingly, women gravitated towards purchasing grocery, health and beauty products while men were more likely to purchase electronics and computers.

In terms of respondents’ age, those 55 to 64 years of age tended to favor the purchase of books, movies, games as well as grocery, health and beauty. Additionally, respondents in the 18-44 age group were more likely to purchase electronics than by those over the age of 45.

The income range of respondents did not seem to make a difference in the types of products purchased based on the ‘like’ of a friend, ostensibly because each product category can have a great variety of products at different price points and was not a focus of this survey.

In addition, we wanted to know the most they had spent on a single product purchased based on the ‘like’ of a friend.  Here we found the ranges between $25and $500 shared a similar percentage of purchases, which was around 20% in all top-4 categories, as depicted below.

After crossing the data, we also got a glimpse of how respondents were spending their money and the products they purchased based in each price range. Below are some of the major takeaways:

• 40% of purchases less than $25 were in the books, movies and games category which was the healthiest percentage of purchases across all products and price ranges.
• Additionally, in the $25-$100 price bracket, the top 3 categories were 1) books, movies and games, 2) entertainment, restaurants and attractions, and 3) grocery, health and beauty with each of these categories representing approximately 25% of the purchases .
• In the $500-$1000 range, 25% of products purchased were electronics and computer related.

Our data here certainly seems to suggest that our top four product categories (1) Books, movies, music, games, 2) entertainment, restaurants and attractions, 3) grocery, health and beauty, 4) electronics and computers) have benefitted from ‘liking’ in social media, but that is not to say that other categories of products would not benefit as well.

To find out if your products will benefit from social media, conducting research within your specific target market is necessary to point you in the right direction when implementing and setting goals for social media.

Look for our next article which will detail some final thoughts about our social media survey and how to increase the consumer “buy-in” of ‘liking’ in social media.

–Katie Mauck, Senior Usability Analyst

With such a large number being positively motivated by a friend’s ‘like’, the next question you might ask is:  How can we increase the number of people ‘liking’ our products?

When we asked participants what motivated them to ‘like’ a product or merchant via social media, we saw that there were several motivating factors.  Respondents could select any or all of the categories applicable to their experience and five top categories soon emerged:

As you might expect, perception of product quality, company reputation and experience with your brand (including your website) are highly motivating. 73% indicated they ‘liked’ a product based on an outstanding experience with a product or merchant, and 38% ‘liked’ a product or merchant because they generally liked the merchant’s website, product photos or other site or company features.

However, other motivators included receiving a discount or coupon (65%), entrance into a sweepstakes or drawing (34%) and to support a cause or charity (51%). Interestingly, our sample size indicated that women may be twice a likely as men to ‘like’ a product supporting a cause or charity.

Many companies have already started to use these strategies.  For example, Orbitz mixed the idea of supporting a cause (by honoring someone in the community) with the added draw of winning a luxury vacation, shown below.

You may have also seen invitations to ‘like’ a product or merchant in return for a coupon or discount, such as the one from Tillamook, below.

But, how much of a coupon do you need to offer in order to attract the ‘likes’?  Of the respondents who indicated they would be motivated to ‘like’ a product or merchant by receiving a discount or coupon, 52% expected at least a 6-15% discount while 35% of respondents expected more than a 15% discount.

As common sense may suggest, the greater the discount the greater number of respondents would be motivated to ‘like’ a product based on that discount.  Determining how much discount to offer should be based on research with your own target market but also on your business goals and the cost/profit ratio that is introduced by offering a coupon or discount.

Encouragingly, our survey shows that discounts and coupons obtained via ‘liking’ in social media do lead to purchases.  As a matter of fact, 70% of our participants who received a coupon or discount from ‘liking’ a product or merchant reported actually using the coupon to purchase the product.

Consideration of these consumer motivators/tactics for your company may be beneficial to your bottom line because social media is proving to increase sales. However, for successful implementation of social media there are questions that only your customers can answer.  Research with your specific target market is key to cultivating a social media presence that works for you and increases sales.

Check back with us soon, as we will discuss more results from our social media survey to help you make your way through the opportunities of ‘liking’ in social media.

–Katie Mauck, Senior Usability Analyst

In Nielsen’s response to the criticism, via an interview with .net magazine, Nielsen defends his omission of Responsive Web Design (RWD) with a quote that probably caused many designers to slap their forehead in frustration.  Of the RWD charge, Nielsen says he omitted it as an option “Because I was writing about user experience, not implementation.”

Designers and product manager are likely to howl about this attitude and his overall argument still does not hold up well to the tenets of RWD.  But I’ll let the RWD experts take care of that argument.  Brad Frost, for example, has already penned an excellent discussion on Content Parity  that effectively debunks a lot of Nielsen’s argument.

Implementation Is Everything

What is perplexing about Nielsen’s comment is that it is indicative of a common criticism of usability testing in general.  Nielsen wants to provide a usability recommendation without considering implementation.  Designers and product managers live and breathe in a world of compromises due to the fact that they have to actually implement features and content while balancing resources, deadlines, project goals, and more.

They can’t evaluate features and designs without evaluating implementation. Implementation is everything when producing applications and websites.

Usability Metrics Don’t Stop At The Display

When confronted with the question of one responsive URL or different URLs per device, Nielsen cops out again “As long as each user sees the appropriate design, the choice between these implementation options should be an engineering decision and not a usability decision.” (emphasis added)

This is a dangerously narrow definition of a usability decision.  The usability of the page is not the only usability metric of concern.  For example, sharing of pages and content on social networks is of paramount importance to most websites today.  The ability of a user to find, read, and share the content is clearly a usability test case (and a conversion metric) for a lot of websites.  Which means that the question “single URL or device dependent URL?” is a key usability factor that Nielsen ignores.  When faced with this question Nielsen punts it as “an engineering decision.”

RWD Implementation Challenges

The modern web is too complex to ignore implementation when reviewing design and usability.  This isn’t just a problem for Nielsen.  Teams that take up the responsive web design banner must face the realities of implementation as well.

For example, we recently had a discussion with a client that was undertaking the task of converting their relatively large ecommerce site to a Responsive Web Design.  The team was excited, management was on board, they had even recently been to our usability labs to test some of their work.  But the reality of converting the entire existing site to a responsive design was daunting and causing conflict.

The problem?  Stakeholders would not compromise on content for the new responsive site.  Everything that exist today on the desktop site needed to be in the new site but some things didn’t translate well.  A keen Mobile First  evangelist, the product manager knew that the real problem was that some of the existing content and features probably needed to be removed from BOTH the desktop and mobile views.  But down in the trenches of real live existing products, you don’t often get to start over and stakeholders don’t like to see their pet features cut in a new release.

From the stakeholders perspective, typically new releases are supposed to mean new features, not fewer features.  And that’s when compromises happen in real projects.

RWD and Mobile First are easy concepts to defend but they are a lot easier to implement when starting from scratch than when converting an existing site.  Often times, the right thing to do (such as cutting content on all views) is hard if not impossible to implement in real world projects due to outside constraints.

Compromised Project Goals

Compromise happens.  For example, take a look at the originally referenced .net magazine interview with Nielsen from the mobile link and the desktop link.  Notice what’s missing from the mobile link?

Ads, menus, widgets, social links, comments, registration, and login are all missing in the mobile site.  I’m guessing .net magazine relies a lot on advertisements and paid subscriptions for most or all of its revenue and it relies on social sharing to bring in more readers (I found the article via Twitter for example).  And yet all of these features are missing from the mobile URL.

It is easier to read the mobile version on my desktop, but as a revenue driving product the mobile site fails to meet (assumed) key requirements of the site.  Compromise happens on every side of the argument.

Usability and Implementation

Nielsen wants to provide usability advice that is implementation agnostic.  Designers and content managers want implementations that are device agnostic.  In the real world of launching and maintaining business websites the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.  Compromise happens so that something gets published, because shipping is a feature too.

Your usability approach must be flexible and ingrained in the project goals to achieve this.  You need to consider not just the usability of the rendered page, but the usability of the rendered link, the availability of key product features (if it is not available the feature is not usable), and the ability of the team to implement the design within project constraints.  Usability decisions are engineering decisions and engineering decisions are usability decisions.

– Brad Cranford, Director of Technology, Usability Sciences

twitter: @aggiebradley |  personal blog

]]> http://usability.com/2012/04/24/compromise-happens/feed/ 7 http://usability.com/2012/04/18/the-usability-blog/ http://usability.com/2012/04/18/the-usability-blog/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:28:24 +0000 usability http://usability.wpengine.com/?p=905 Read More »]]> As you may have noticed, our site looks different. Over the past two weeks we’ve been overhauling the blog. Not only did we change the look, but we chose a new name, The Usability Blog.  Our purpose is still the same, to provide a practical guide to user experience insight, but our methods are evolving.  In addition to blogging on relevant usability topics, we’ll be hosting webinettes(past and future), hosting guest authors, and partnering with companies that share our state of mind.  Stick around and help us build a new community of usability professionals and enthusiasts.

As we grow and develop we want to hear from our readers. Have an idea or a question? Comment below!

–The Usability Blog Team

Digital thought leaders are calling the times in which we live the Relationship Era of marketing. They reference the need for Trust Agent networks. They insist that brands must now communicate touchpoint by touchpoint, on a personalized, one-to-one basis, building trust with every encounter.

This is valid. This is not, however, new — at least to the world outside of marketing.

Building relationships the good old-fashioned way

As marketing continues the transition from mass, single message communication into the realm of customer-by-customer relationship-building, it is effectively embracing the discipline known in pre-digital times as Selling. Effective selling has always been about forging enduring, loyal relationships. Effective selling relies on relationship-building principles established long before the advent of digital life.

At its heart, relationship-building is no more than doing the right thing by people. When you behave that way over time, people grow to trust you. When they trust you, they come back to you and continue to give you their business. You have proven (especially on occasions when you have done the right thing counter to your own interests) that you are — among other things — honest, fair, respectful, punctual, responsive, diligent, and responsible. What you have been is the best indicator of what you likely will be. You have earned trust. You will enjoy the rewards trust brings.

If brands are to adopt relationship-building as their digital marketing strategy, the brand itself must behave like a person – like a sales person working to earn the trust of a customer. The brand must deliver on its promises as diligently and consistently as the sales person (and the organization behind the sales person) must deliver on his or her promises.

The socially-engaged customer and viral consequences

Once the brand stops behaving in a manner that engenders trust and starts exhibiting behaviors that undermine trust, customers will become less loyal and more receptive to the enticements of competitors. When ( in this viral, digital age) a brand experience does not live up to a socially engaged customer’s expectations, that customer’s Facebook friends, Twitter followers, blog readers, and fellow chatters and forum attendees all get to know about it within seconds. That’s not exactly healthy for the brand. A bad experience is bad enough, but if the experience constitutes a betrayal, then the viral consequences for the brand can be dire, sometimes catastrophic. Ask Dominos or Taco Bell or Tiger or any other brand whose behavior has contravened everything its customers or fans have come to expect.

Nielsen’s Buzzmetrics division monitors social buzz (or The Conversation, as they call it) for major brands. Nielsen reports that the #1 “buzz” topics for consumer-serving brands (fast food companies, cable companies, car companies, for example) are actually the good old (pre-digital) issues – bathroom hygiene in fast food restaurants, customer service issues with cable or telephone companies, product defects for the car companies.

Nielsen advises its clients to make sure that they re-engineer their business processes in a way that allows them to take (especially) the negative feedback from the buzz and act on it. The brand needs to acknowledge the problem, thank the customer for bringing it to their attention, accept responsibility for it, fix it, communicate progress back to its customers, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Just like a real person must do when they want to salvage or repair any regular personal relationship in which they have mishandled.

Why trust is the new black

Relationships can survive isolated instances where the one party fails to deliver on its promises. Brands cannot expect to sustain relationships with their customers, however, if they fail to correct problems and see news of that failure broadcast across the social media landscape from a growing cadre of “betrayed” customers.

And the new millennium has already seen a parade of betrayals by business, especially and most recently by iconic brands from Wall Street. The Edelman Trust Barometer, which measures the public’s trust in a variety of areas, is barely above the lowest point in the survey’s 10-year history. The US public’s trust in the business sector is lower than that of almost every national public surveyed. This is important because trust drives the kind of consumer/customer behavior businesses want to see (repeat purchase, recommendation, stock purchase) and distrust drives exactly what they don’t want (churn, negative recommendation, and stock dumping).

As brands embrace Relationship Building as their digital marketing strategy, therefore, they would be wise to study, embrace, and adapt the principles developed in the analog world of selling and behave like a real person. With that understanding, they can use trust as the metric by which they measure the health of their customer experience across every touchpoint. That is why Trust is the new Black.

–Roger Beynon, Chief Strategy Officer

How it works and what you’ll get:

The Comparative Test typically places your website/product against two to three competitors. Test participants are asked to perform the same core tasks on each product. As they work through the products, they are asked to provide qualitative feedback as well as complete a variety of surveys, including satisfaction and preference surveys.

During this process, the following occurs – A) Users identify likes and dislikes of each product, and ultimately identify a preference and B) through observation, the analyst team uncovers strengths and weaknesses of each product. When these are coupled with one another, the analyst team is then able to create and recommend a Best-of-Breed model. In other words, if the best attributes from all competitors were merged into one product, the end result would be the best of breed.

This will equip your team with the knowledge to answer important questions such as “What new features and functions should we incorporate into our design?”, “What’s working well with our product and what needs improvement?”, and “What ideas can we borrow from our competition and what ideas should we avoid?”

What we recommend:

We recommend comparing three products during the study (ideally, your product and two competitor products). This allows participants to spend a reasonable amount of time on each product and get a feel for how the products differ from one another. Occasionally, clients want to compare a greater number of products. This can be done, but the richness of insight into any given product may be compromised. Basically, more time spent per product equates to a deeper user experience and thus, a more meaningful comparison.

We’ll work with you to create tasks that expose users to the products’ core features and functions. The goal is to ensure an apples-to-apples experience so that users can make valid comparisons. And don’t worry; if the products have unique features, we have ways to incorporate them into the study as well.

Typically, we recommend recruiting around 12 users in a study of this nature. Trends will begin to emerge between users 4-8, allowing results to comfortably solidify between users 8-12.

What you won’t get:

A common misconception is that a Comparative Test will yield recommendations to resolve usability issues. These typically won’t surface in this type of methodology due to the fact that users are not afforded the amount of time needed to truly explore trouble spots and provide in-depth suggestions. More importantly, moderator questioning is limited so as to avoid artificially amplifying both positive and negative issues and coloring user impressions. Our moderators provide the playing field and the users are left to their own experience to draw conclusions.

You also won’t get metrics such as Time on Task, Success/Failure rates, etc. These metrics are derived in our more clinical and rigidly structured methodology known as the Competitive Test. That’s a topic for another discussion.

When it’s appropriate:

A Comparative Test is a valuable tool that can be used at a variety of different stages of a product’s life. If you have yet to design a website/product or have one in an early stage, this methodology can help identify what features and attributes are most valued by users. If you’re preparing a redesign for an existing website/product, the methodology can help steer you in the right direction, and more importantly, steer you away from bad decisions. And finally, if you have a mature product, the Comparative methodology is an excellent way to gauge where you stand against newer competitors and help identify enhancements and revisions for your own product.

Contact us to discuss how we might use this methodology to serve your needs and help put you ahead of your competition.

– Jason Vasilas, Senior User Experience Specialist

“Although there are great systems for allowing feedback surveys on every page of your site, I’m not in favour of using any form of pop-up which might distract your visitor from whatever they want to do.

Instead, my favourite type of e-commerce survey is one embedded in the order confirmation page. I like these because there is zero risk of distracting someone from placing an order since the survey is only offered once the sale is complete.”

Tim anticipates that this will raise objections, so he adds:

“The obvious objection is that this means you don’t get any survey entries from people who did not intend to buy or were unable to buy. That’s a common-sense point. But in reality it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

… In real life it turns out that people who have problems buying can be remarkably tenacious. Some will eventually find what they want, or make it through a tricky checkout, and then let you know all about the problems when they get to the survey comments form.”

It may, indeed, be a valid assumption that problems experienced by those who complete transactions are the same as the problems of those who abandon the site or fail to complete a transaction.  But how do you know for sure?  More importantly, how do you quantify the impact of those problems?  How do you measure the revenue loss they inflict?  How do you determine their root cause?  How do you set priorities in taking remedial action?

Failure data may be the most valuable kind you collect

As convenient as it may appear, surveying only those who emerge from the confirmation page necessarily skews the sample and presents a distorted picture of the user experience, especially the experience of visitors who fail.  Visit failure data may be the most valuable data a site can investigate because beneath that cumulative experience lie the root causes of conversion impediments.  Intercepting visitors at the start of their journey through your website ensures that you include those who fail as well as those who transact.  For most e-commerce sites, the proportion of those who do not purchase far exceeds those who do.  The process of identifying whom the site fails, where it fails them, and why it fails them offers the most direct route to continuous improvement.

Behavioural and attitudinal feedback from hundreds of thousands of survey respondents over the last decade reveals patterns applicable to any e-commerce site.  This is what they look like:

They start with some notional depiction of shopper behaviour – the sequence of thoughts or actions they evidence when shopping online.

These steps can be grouped into three basic user decision points:

Suitability – is this site likely to meet my needs?

Findability – how easily can I make my way to the product or information I seek?

Buyability – how easily can I reach certitude and then complete the transaction?

Visitors who fall out of the funnel at the site suitability level represent (in our classification) the problem of Bounce.

Visitors who fall out of the funnel at the findability level represent Opportunity Loss.

Visitors who fall out of the funnel at the buyability level represent the Abandonment problem.

These problems are what site owners must identify, quantify, analyze, and address if they are to systematically attack visit failure and its impact on conversion.  Sampling the visitor population only from those who successfully navigate their way through to the confirmation page makes this process inordinately difficult, if not impossible.

Continuous improvement is not just a tool; it is a philosophy and a strategy.  If a site is going to commit to a continuous improvement process, it should ask visitors to participate from the outset of their journey, so that it captures the full spectrum of site experiences and outcomes.  That’s where analysis starts and systematic improvement begins.

–Roger Beynon, CSO