The Shopper ‘Journey’ is Actually a Minefield
The more we learn about real-world customer experiences, the more we see that we've been horribly naive about the role that mobile devices play in shoppers' lives.
Everyone agrees that providing a great customer experience is critical to business success, and everyone agrees that mobile plays an increasingly important role in that experience. But far too often we're doing mobile wrong – failing to understand how it fits with other channels like desktop browsing and physical stores. We also massively underestimate how distracted and inattentive people are when they use smartphones.
The shopper journey, so elegant and straightforward when we sketch it on a whiteboard, is actually a random walk through a minefield of distractions and competing priorities. The result is retail mobile apps and websites that underperform, and marketing programs that fail to engage people. Creating a great shopper experience in the multichannel world requires a much higher standard for simplicity and flexibility than most of us realize. We need a dramatically different mindset in our design and testing.
Here are three steps to get started:
1. Design for a non-linear journey. We once assumed that customers stuck to a single distribution "channel" when making a purchase. The reality is that most customers now cross channels when considering a purchase. They may hear about a product on their smartphone, research it in a store, and then make the purchase on a tablet.
Analytics companies are working very hard to track these customer interactions, but we're adding new channels like wearable devices faster than we can learn how to track them. So for commerce, you need to design sales processes on the assumption that people will move between channels as they consider a purchase. Since you don't know how people will flow, you should assume they might move in any direction, and design for flexibility.
One simple step: Make it easy for a customer to forward their shopping cart from device to device, without the deadly step of logging in, so they can start to shop on one device and finish the shopping elsewhere. You can use e-mail or even text messages to do this.
2. Design for distraction. Psychologists speak of "perceptual blindness," a situation in which busy people don't notice things that are right in front of them. Smartphones set up the perfect storm for perceptual blindness. Think how the typical smartphone is used – pulled out for a moment while the user is on the go or in the middle of some other task. We frequently see cases in which smartphone users fail to notice text or buttons that are right on the screen, even when they're highlighted in red.
Often this happens because they're not expecting to see the information. For example, in a recent real-world test, a smartphone user opened a restaurant-finding app looking for reviews. She failed to notice a message saying that the restaurant was closed. She was so focused on scrolling down to the reviews that she simply didn't notice anything else.
To solve this problem, you have to backstop the user. You should assume they won't see the first notice of an important fact. Repeat it elsewhere. Consider how your app or site is being used, and put the most important information in context. For example, if they open the map function and start walking to the restaurant, that's a sign they probably don't realize the restaurant is closed. Remind them.
3. Get out of the lab. Most of the industry's usability testing practices were created for desktop computing. We tell people to go to a quiet room, or we put them in a distraction-free usability lab, and ask them to try our retail apps or websites there. Lab testing is fine for icon designs and UX elements, but for testing overall usability of a mobile app or site, the lab is deadly. It'll mislead you into thinking that your app or site is far easier to use than it really is. What you need to do is ask someone to test your app while walking down the street, or riding a noisy bus, or feeding a cranky five-year-old. You'll be astonished at how even the best-crafted mobile products break down when pitted against the real world.
New technology lets you collect data and insights from users at home, at work, in stores, and on-the-go. Gerry Chu, user researcher at Zillow, has used in-the-wild user research technology to understand how customers are using Zillow mobile products.
Chu says, "We can learn how people use our apps in distracting real-world settings, such as an open house, or while talking to a real estate agent. One of the surprises we already came across was how many users are multitasking by searching home listings while sitting on the couch and watching television."
In-the-wild research gives retailers the ability to look over the shoulder of their target customer, leading to “aha” moments where they can see each point at which a user becomes confused or misses an important call-to-action. Seeing what the user is doing and hearing what the user is thinking allows retailers to identify these pain points and answer any remaining questions left after their data analysis.
Providing a seamless shopper experience across channels is no easy task. It's so daunting that many retailers are tackling it through huge multiyear consulting projects. But you don't have to wait for the top-down approach to kick in. There are practical steps you can take today to give yourself an edge in the multichannel world. Retailers that have an accurate understanding of their overall customer experience will gain a huge competitive advantage over those that simply guess at why users do what they do.