Marketing organizations fall prey to waterfall approaches to updating websites and this generally is a result of an annual budgeting process. Since you’d never leave a retail store untouched for weeks or months on end, why should your online visitors suffer this mistreatment with your site?

It doesn’t matter if you sell online or not, your website is a storefront, not a campaign. As such, maintaining a website is a process, not an event.

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Consumer-friendly messaging, right?

Aside from the visual design of the site, it’s the vague message that has my eyes rolling. Basically, this website exists to tell you your tax refund status, but the Department of Revenue cannot provide specific estimates on when individuals will receive their refunds. But alas, everyone who is due a refund will receive a refund! I guess that makes it all better, right?

Imagine if you placed an order for a product, it’s been weeks and you haven’t received your shipment. You call the retailer only to hear them say “we can’t provide you with a status of your order but rest assured, you will receive your shipment.”

Voice of the taxpayer online

I would love to see a government site use OpinionLab or ForeSee Results on their sites. Taxpayers should then be able to see the aggregated feedback ratings & scores. Government website operators could then focus on ease of use and helpful tools online. Messages like above only insult taxpayer intelligence and further throw gas on the fire.

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However, I’m wondering when they (and other satellite & cable providers) will begin to think differently about how they present channel guides both online and via the TV remote?

Here’s DIRECTV’s guide:

These are mainly local channels. Wouldn’t it be better to offer a filter that said “Local Channels” that I could click and see these? I’m not familiar enough with the Station IDs to know if they represent ABC, NBC, CBS, etc. Sure, I can generally tell by the programming listed, but still. This would never fly on a major retailer website for listing products this way.

If TV stations were like consumer products…

If this were an e-commerce site, end-users would be driven away if they were forced to only view products by numerical product ID and a short-code. Through history of channel surfing by number, I suppose this method of thinking is engrained in many people’s minds.

However, with the volume of channels being what they are, presenting them in numerical channel order is a growing usability challenge. I live in a world where I DVR virtually everything and watch it at a later date. I am completely channel number and station ID agnostic — I honestly don’t know what channels “my shows” are on.

Searching for TV shows

Let’s look at keyword search results for “olympics”

Support topics are shown first. Then site pages.  Hopefully there’s research to support this ordering, but generally speaking, a topic like “olympics” is probably more related to TV programming than a support article. “Satellite doesn’t work” would certainly be a reason to show support articles first. Below the fold (scrolling down on a 20″ monitor) I see 5 results for TV programming.

I don’t know what NBCw vs. NBCwHD means. Unfortunately there’s no title for me to click on to find out why this matched my search for “olympics.” Let’s click “view all”:

More empty titles. Again, search results displayed by channel and then by date with no sorting options.

DIRECTV offers a slick option to “Record to DVR” from their website. As such, having the ability to filter search results by content rather than channel and date/time is important because on the web and with the ability to “Record to DVR”, the channel and date/time are irrelevant.

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For example: Because I’ve been buried in doing actual work the past couple weeks, I first heard about Google Buzz through RSS feeds before getting the notification that it was ready for my Gmail account.

And judging by the RSS feeds, the type of coverage was akin to TMZ covering Jersey Shore cast news.

Oh my, people. Relax.

The early adopter community of these technologies get so caught up in overanalyzing every move in the industry that they lose sight of where these innovations and changes take us from a consumer perspective.

It makes me yearn for the format of a magazine that reports on industry news in a less timely format, but without all of the initial noise, gossip, and speculation woven into the article like I’m seeing so much of online.

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Social Media has the potential for large companies to feel small and make each customer feel valued like local businesses have been doing for years.

My local dry cleaner

Each week when I drop off my dry cleaning at the local dry cleaner, the owner greets me by my first name. I’ve even seen the owner working out at the local gym and he still referred to me by my first name.

Making me feel valued and worth remembering

It’s one thing to see a customer’s vehicle pull into your parking lot giving you have a few moments to recall their name, it’s another to see the customer out of context and still remember their name.

It’s hard to explain how this feels as a customer to be remembered both in and outside of the business.

I have yet to feel this way after visiting or purchasing from a website.

Which is your social media strategy?

That of my local dry cleaner? Or something else:

There’s little in the relationship and loyalty department to be gained when your business’ Twitter account is for posting your cheapest products, your Facebook page is about acquiring the most followers, and your blog is filled with content designed for search engine rankings and not people.

Build a relationship, not a campaign

The point of Social Media is not to “build a list,” “go viral,” or “get impressions/mentions.” Social Media is not a campaign.

Social Media, done correctly, enables your business to intelligently connect with your loyalists to build deep relationships over time.

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(Old screenshot of the site — when Circuit City was still in business to be able to run banner ads)

It started as just a hobby

From ’98-’02 it truly was a hobby, funded entirely by the money out of our pockets with no real plan in place. We knew we had something unique because people kept coming to the site, registering, loading up their vehicle information, pictures, sounds, and videos — all by word of mouth. But man, it was an expensive hobby to have, even with costs split between the three of us.

It became a business (but a part-time one)

In ’03 we officially became a Limited Liability Company, setup a business banking account, had company credit cards, designed and printed company business cards, had a company phone line, mailing address, and made a run at selling banner advertising inventory for the ad space on the site.

A trip to SEMA to visit existing and potential sponsors, trips to local car shows, and continuous involvement in the enthusiast community with our own hobby-based vehicles continued to get the word out.

Startup.com was a truly inspiring documentary that we watched countless time during these years.

On the up-and-up

From ’04-’05 we operated like a business: regular strategy meetings, constant site updates, new feature enhancements, active forums, and we had regular revenue coming in from sponsors, ad networks, and membership fees — it was exhilarating. I could see it someday becoming a full-time gig if we really wanted to make a run at it. We just lacked the financial stability to go at it on our own for an extended period of time.

The day jobs take prescedence

In ’06 I moved from Minnesota to North Carolina to pursue a career in online marketing with a Fortune 500 company. Essentially, I had found a day job doing exactly what was so exciting about SuperMotors.net. Being an online site, we felt that we could continue to run the hobby-based-business-that-we-secretly-hoped-would-be-a-full-time-business-someday as if the distance between us would not matter.

It mattered, and in a big way.

Web 2.0 was blowing up and our site was stagnant

The Web 2.0 hoopla was blowing up, web technology was crazy, and hosting was becoming cheaper by the minute — all things that should have contributed to a healthier bottom line, new and innovative features, but they didn’t. My two friends and I were no longer meeting regularly. My move away from the business’ home state had made it extremely difficult to collaborate.

The day jobs were getting more exciting, too.

In 2008, we decided to sell.

The decision to sell

This was a tough, tough decision. By this point, we had 10 years into the site both as a hobby and a business. We knew what we had on our hands, but we did not have the means to take it to the next level that we wanted to — and it was beginning to show. Site updates and feature enhancements were nonexistent. Support requests from our members would go unanswered for weeks. The site was stuck on cruise control at 40 MPH in a 75 MPH speed zone.

Falling victim to the economy

Our buyer in 2008 had to bail on the deal as we were closing in on a finalized sales agreement. So much time had passed since our decision to sell and when we drew up the papers that the economy had gone south, and so did the buyer’s ability to finance the purchase. Up until this point, I had dodged the bad economy impact, but it became real when something as small as our website was a victim of the economy going south. Who knew?

Maybe we just weren’t ready to sell. Did we have a renewed interest in the site? Was this the kick in the pants we needed?

Several months had passed after the deal fell through and it was clear that it was still the right move for us to sell.

Selling the business was the most difficult business decision

The decision to sell (again) was tough. It’s not like we were living off of the site — we weren’t. We all had day jobs. At this point, we had not continued dialogue with sponsors and the site was running break-even. But it was the potential of what could be that was so enticing about the site and what was so troubling about the decision to sell. The “what if’s” plagued us.

Admitting “I can’t make this happen”

I had to objectively look at things. When I did this, it gave me the clarity I needed: I was not going to make this site into the success I hoped and knew it could be. I couldn’t do it.

When you say this to yourself about something that essentially is within your control, it’s a very difficult realization. But, on the flip-side, I have a successful career and the experience in setting up a business, operating a site, meeting with customers, interacting with the end-users — it has all contributed to my professional experience and I had fun while doing it.

It was time to let somebody else do this. And by letting go, I was doing a favor to our end-users who had stuck with us for so long.

It’s sold

As I write this, it’s been nearly two weeks since selling the site. It didn’t become real until I could no longer access the server or had control of the domains. It’s on odd feeling, but there is a sense of relief that the site is in better and more capable hands now than it has been in a couple years. I no longer have a guilty conscience as I look in my inbox — there are no more unanswered customer and/or end-user emails that I tell myself “I’ll get to this weekend.”

In the end, I made the right decision and have no regrets.

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Old design = 20 headlines to scan. New design = 72 headlines to scan.

Previously, CNN.com provided a 2-headline synopsis of across 10 categories and at any given time throughout the day, I could visit their homepage and get a quick run-down of all that was going on in the world.

With the latest redesign, this quick run-down became much more time-consuming. And there was no way to tailor the news categories to my preferences. The previous website didn’t offer this option either and was less important, but the new design now features 6 headlines across 12 categories.

That’s 72 headlines I now have to scan as opposed to the previous 20 headlines. This is a huge increase in content and considerably more “work” to scan.

Google’s “news” personalization, simplicity, and path of least resistance wins

I ventured upon news.google.com and found it quite easy to personalize the sections I am interested as well as sort them in the order of importance I want them to be in. This feature in itself was enough to win me over — the way in which they aggregate news from multiple publications is also a benefit.

CNN.com’s one-size-fits-all approach to homepage news doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I’ve abandoned them because I’ve found an alternate service that meets my needs. What’s interesting is CNN provides unique content but this is not enough to win me over because it’s too difficult to get the information I desire quickly.

A commoditized business should focus product innovation on user experience and ease of use

“News” as a product is commoditized and is partially why newspapers are on the decline. If the product research or delivery mechanism doesn’t cater to the changing needs of consumers or customers, then business will be lost to the competitive set. This concept applies to virtually all business, and not just news websites.

CNN.com offers a beautiful new redesign, but has chosen a path that devalues consumers who share my news-consumption preference. I don’t know if this is intentional or not, but through further insight-gathering and subsequent innovation with their website, they would recapture my interest.

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There are astute strategies to be found in each of the profiles in this issue. Here are 10 lessons that all e-retailers can take away from the innovations of this year’s Hot 100 online retailers.

1.) Connect with consumers

2.) Go mobile

3.) Be an expert source

4.) Make navigation more useful

5.) Personalize the experience

6.) Make tough purchases easy*

7.) Sell yourself

8.) Create a sense of urgency

9.) Connect site and store

10.) Play the value card

*Levolor.com was highlighted in the “Housewares / home / hardware” category and the feature can be seen here. More specifically, we addressed the #6 lesson above of “make tough purchases easy.”

This is the synopsis graphic Internet Retailer publishes for each of the Hot 100 sites outlining things such as technologies and vendors/partners used:

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1.) While watching the Vikings vs. Packers NFL game this evening, a commercial for HTC’s new “You” campaign came on.

2.) Feeling so connected to it, I tweeted about it while on the couch with my laptop.

3.) Prior to tweeting about it, I had to find the video on YouTube to link to it in the tweet. I found it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-QhxjJFl7E

4.) In the YouTube comments, I saw the name of the artist that created the song used in the commercial. (It should be noted that I wasn’t really looking to buy this song initially.)

5.) I copied & pasted the artist & song name into Google (search results here).

6.) Found the song on Last.fm. Was able to play it directly on Last.fm to verify that it was the correct song. It was.

7.) Clicked the “buy” button on Last.fm. That brought me to Amazon.com for a 1-click purchase.

$0.99 later and after couple minutes of my time, I now have the song.

The above scenario will only get easier.

The above scenario will only get easier and faster with fewer steps to the point of purchase. Convenience is key. If your industry or market hasn’t been impacted by this, it will be. There may be technical limitations or generational preferences, but either way, both will catch up, align, and make buying your product as easy as it was for me to buy this song (even for someone not necessarily in the market).

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A component of any E-Commerce strategy impacting end-buyers will ultimately need to incorporate channel strategy, too. Managing channel conflict, especially for manufacturers selling direct to consumers, is a critical component to your E-Commerce strategy. Pricing, promotions, product offerings, how you communicate where and how to buy your products — these all play into your E-Commerce Channel strategy.

I keep a running and constantly-updated definition of E-Business outlined here: http://www.ebusinessblog.org/what-is-ebusiness/ .

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I prefer a cadence of every-other-week 1-on-1 meetings with direct reports. Your mileage may vary depending on number of direct reports, geographic location, etc.

Commit to a schedule

Whatever you do, when you schedule these meetings with your direct reports, don’t reschedule them, and reschedule them, and reschedule them.

Nothing says “this conversation is not important to me” more than a meeting that repeatedly gets pushed back days or weeks after its originally scheduled day and time.

Depending on your position on the organizational chart, there may be a lot of preparatory work that your direct reports go through prior to a 1-on-1 meeting. Your availability may also be a premium, so your direct reports may queue up important discussions for that 1-on-1 session where they have your undivided attention that they would otherwise not be able to get.

Fish or cut bait

If the meeting is destined to never actually take place, then don’t bother setting the expectation that you will meet in the first place — it’ll save time for everyone.

During this time of year especially, when everyone is busy, make the time to invest in meeting with your direct reports. After all, they are supporting your objectives and ultimately make you successful.

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Step 1: The homepage

• After visiting the homepage of PizzaHut.com, you see a very clear “Order Now” button. No confusion here.

Step 2: Enter delivery address

• My primary concern here is whether or not Pizza Hut recognizes my address since our home is newer and is often not found in mapping databases like Google Maps or Mapquest. No issues here — it lets me proceed with my order, no questions asked.

Step 3: Pizza menu

• Body of page: The featured products tab is highlighted by default and I see two featured products.
• Right-hand side of page: Here it clearly shows my order is for delivery and which Pizza Hut location will be delivering my order. This is helpful because if I change my mind and order this for carryout, I may want to pick up from a different location (i.e. if I’m ordering from work and swing by a different location on the way home). Smart.
• Cons:
  • There’s an unusual amount of white space due to the right-hand side of the page containing an advertisement reminding me “don’t forget dessert!” Recommendation: This may benefit from more relevant placement after I’ve added an item to my current order.

Step 4: Building the first pizza of the challenge

• No search. As mentioned in a previous post in the Outback configurator, there are no search options on PizzaHut.com. Since I understand the products, I can generally find what I need, however I’m looking for “deep dish” pizza which means “pan pizza” on the Pizza Hut website. Subtle difference, and a search option would ultimately clear this up for me either by returning the Pan Pizza result or providing me a “did you mean pan pizza?” alternate search.
• View Larger Image: I took these screen shots in Safari 4 and unfortunately this link does not work. Recommendation: at this point it may be more relevant to use the page real estate to show some pricing (i.e. Small Starting at $9.99, Medium Starting at $11.99, Large Starting at $13.99).

Step 5: Configuring the first pizza

• This preselects the crust as “Pan Pizza” based on the item chosen in Step 4. It can optionally be changed to another crust type at this point.

• The defaulted list of options.

• Pros:
  • Straight-forward — intuitive option layout indicating you can have sauce, cheese, and other toppings on the left, right, or whole of the pizza.
  • Based on the criteria outlined in this pizza configurator challenge, I was able to successfully build the pizza I wanted without confusion
• Cons:
  • “x2″ while less intuitive means twice the topping. I’m not sure why sauce and cheese doesn’t have a “x2″ option — instead these both have an alternate selection called “EXTRA.” Recommendation: When user interfaces are inconsistent, it leads to confusion. If you’re doubling the topping or adding extra, it’s typically best to utilize the same user interface options for selecting this.
  • No pricing is listed, so you don’t know how much additional toppings will cost. In fact, as I will point out later, you can never understand how the cost of the pizza is calculated because you only ever see the total cost. If you are on a budget, you have to guess your way through the pizza configurator and hope that you land within your price range. Recommendation: Show the surcharge next to each topping. There’s enough page real estate to do it, so there shouldn’t be any layout challenges in doing so.

Step 6: Add first pizza to order

• Pros:
  • As you add items to your order, they are shown on the right-hand side of the screen. This is helpful if placing a large order to ensure you don’t miss a line item.
• However, what’s wrong with this picture? No details on the pizza. If you have multiple pizzas on an order, it would be impossible to tell the difference between them all. Let’s click on “Show details.”

• Cons:
  • This reads rather unfriendly for me. Recommendation: A bulleted list would be more appropriate using the graphical indicators like on the configurator screen to indicate which side of the pizza the toppings are being added to.
  • Again, no pricing to indicate surcharges for the extra toppings. Recommendation: Showing surcharges by topping would enable consumers to edit the configured pizza and add, remove, or substitute toppings that make sense for their budget. If my budget is $15.00, nobody wins by not showing me the surcharges because I’ll play with the various configurations until I get my order to be in the budget I’m working within.

Step 10: Configuring the second pizza

• The second part of the challenge is to order a large, hand-tossed pizza with as many toppings as possible to test the limits of the pizza configurator. Here we go:

• I was able to select every possible topping. However:

• Cons:
  • After the 6th topping, this message popped up each time I added an additional topping. Recommendation: If you can’t successfully make something, then it probably shouldn’t be offered for purchase.
  • If you do still offer to make it, is there any guarantee that it will be fully cooked? Or do the cooks just throw their hands up after the pizza rolls through the oven? Recommendation: The error message is a bit vague and while I understand there may be problems, I would rather be restricted from ordering it at all if there’s going to be an issue with the product…or at least be provided with a means for contacting the store for special instructions for cooking.

Step 11: Add second pizza to order

• Exact same concern as in step #6 above. This time the problem is evident. How do two large pizzas amount to $52.82? Let’s click “Show Details” to see.

• Cons:
  • Same concerns as #6 with the addition of the following insight:
  • Toppings aside, there’s no way to see how much each pizza on this order costs. For the budget-conscious, this presents a problem. When I got to the local Pizza Hut, I get an itemized breakdown on my receipt, shouldn’t the website behave similarly?

Step 12: Checkout

• I’m showing the checkout pages to illustrate any additional merchandising efforts and here Pizza Hut is promoting stuffed pizza roles and P’zone pizzas.
• Pros:
  • This is a nice layout, easy to understand pricing, easy to see how to add to cart. Plus, they have provided photos at the top of the merchandising offer which show the products.
• Cons:
  • On their main menu, they had a right-hand advertisement saying “don’t forget the dessert!” However, here I am at the checkout page and I don’t have the dessert, but they are not promoting dessert — they are trying to sell me products that could essentially amount to an entire meal on their own. Recommendation: This is an example of a missed merchandising opportunity because the website isn’t smart enough to realize I already have my main course in the cart, ready to check out. They should be targeting other items to compliment my order. (This appears to be a trend as I review more sites, Outback suffers from it, too)

(Brief) User Experience Analysis

Pizza Hut’s site suffers from browser-specific issues in Safari that have been prominent for a couple years (as long as I’ve used Safari, actually). While these do not hinder my ability to place orders, it’s the equivalent to eating at one of those wobbly restaurant tables (because the floor isn’t level). While this doesn’t deter you from leaving, it sure is a nuisance and plays into the overall customer experience.

Outside of this, I personally use Pizza Hut’s ordering site the most primarily because we choose carryout a lot and it’s one of the closer locations to our home. The very fact that they have a configurator is reason enough for us to choose Pizza Hut over another local pizza establishment because of the convenience of ordering online.

A comprehensive analysis of Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, and Domino’s configurators will follow after each review is posted. Stay tuned for my next review of the Papa John’s pizza configurator as a part of this “building your pizza online” series of posts.

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vs.

vs.

This is the third post in a series of product configurator reviews and I’ll review the online configuration process for ordering pizzas. Pizza is a simple product which everyone understands, so the product configurator probably needs to be less about form and more about function. At the end of the day however, these online configurators are designed to sell food that should be appealing to the potential buyer and we’ll walk through the “build your own pizza” order process from each of these nationwide chains.

The Rules

Like any good usability study and to properly benchmark each product configurator, the intent is to use each configurator for the same exact purpose. Here’s what we’ll be walking through on each of the configurators:

1. Configure an order for delivery to my home address
2. Build 1 pizza with the following:
   1. Large deep dish crust
   2. Extra cheese on the entire pizza
   3. Pepperoni on 1/2 of the pizza (because that’s all my wife likes)
   4. Sausage, green peppers, and onions on the other 1/2 (for me)
3. Build a second pizza with the following:
   1. Large hand-tossed crust
   2. As many toppings as possible (to push the constraints of the configurator)
4. See the individual costs of each pizza, delivery surcharges, and taxes. While this is making my hungry while writing, I unfortunately will not be placing my order.

The Purpose/Goal

The purpose of this is to identify the site with the best configurator. “Best” is defined as:

1. Easiest to use/navigate
2. Fewest clicks
3. High degree of confidence that the order will be accurate when received by the store
4. Visually appealing — it should make me want to order the product!

Let’s see how each site stacks up!

PizzaHut.com

At an estimated 2.4 Million U.S. visitors per month, Pizzahut.com is ranked at #523 in the Quantcast index. PizzaHut.com ranks highest among these three sites in terms of Quantcast-estimated traffic. That equates to a substantial number of configured orders every month from consumers ordering online.

PapaJohns.com

At an estimated 1.5 Million U.S. visitors per month, PapaJohns.com is ranked at #1,006 in the Quantcast index.

Dominos.com

At an estimated 1.7 Million U.S. visitors per month, Dominos.com is ranked at #855 in the Quantcast index, slightly above PapaJohns.com but still behind PizzaHut.com.

The Usability Challenge

Due to the number of screen shots, each site is covered in a separate blog post:

1. View the PizzaHut.com Pizza Configurator Usability Challenge
2. View the PapaJohns.com Pizza Configurator Usability Challenge (link will be updated after the review is complete)
3. View the Dominos.com Pizza Configurator Usability Challenge (link will be updated after the review is complete)
4. View the Final Analysis (link will be updated after all 3 reviews are complete)

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This is the second post in an ongoing series of product configurator reviews in which I review the online configuration process on websites.

Recently I placed my first online order with Outback Steakhouse for curbside pickup. I appreciated the ability to order online but found some usability concerns that I’d like to outline in this post. Prior to this online order, I was neither aware of online ordering or curbside pickup at Outback. This is mostly due to the fact that we do not frequently dine there (2-3 times per year on average).

The purpose of this post is to articulate how user experience in a physical store environment (in this case, the Outback restaurant) is not always reflected online. Companies large and small need to factor the physical experience requirements with the virtual experience requirements. If an Outback restaurant was presented like their online ordering experience is presented, there would be few repeat purchasers.

On with the screen shot reviews:

Step 1: Main Menu

My initial reactions:

• No search. This is an area that I haven’t seen many online restaurants embrace, yet. If I know what I want, I should be able to search for it. However, I can somewhat understand why it’s not offered because restaurants generally try to emulate their physical menus — which obviously do not offer searching capabilities.
• One long, scrollable menu. The left-hand navigation is a series of anchor points. This was an interesting concept that didn’t bother me, but came across as non-standard. This layout would be more of a problem if there were a lot of pictures.
• Lack of pictures. The only menu item with a picture is the Aussie-Tizers at the very top. This is an online merchandising faux pax. Hard to up-sell someone, especially with food, if you can’t see what it looks like — this is why restaurants typically have the “dessert cart” to show off / upsell their desserts when you think you can’t fit anything else in your stomach.

Step 2: “Configuring” Baby Back Ribs?

• Clicking a red link in the left column forces the right column of the browser window to refresh.
• OK, I see Baby Back Ribs on the right-hand side of my screen.
• I have to click on links in the right-hand side to further configure this order (i.e. “click to substitute”).
• Usability concern: Clicking on links generally takes me away to another page (I want to order Baby Back Ribs — will I need to re-add them to my cart after leaving this page because I’m not clicking “Add to Order” yet?). Very non-standard.

Step 3: “Configuring” the sides

• I “click to substitute” Aussie Fries for a Signature Side Salad (if you’ve ever ordered fries with a curbside pickup order from any restaurant, you know that the fries are soggy by the time they make it back to your house).
• I don’t understand what “Special Instructions” are for. In my first pass through their site (before taking screenshots), I entered my salad dressing type here. The last thing I wanted was a salad without salad dressing.

Step 4: Choose side salad type

• Right-hand part of the page has refreshed again, now asking me for a salad type. Again, not that I personally need them, but showing pictures here would really help upsell to other types of sides/salads. Instead I go for the old faithful “House Salad.”

Step 5: Choose salad dressing

• Page refreshes again and asks me for the salad dressing type. For some reason, this is a drop-down menu instead of radio buttons like the previous page. Subtle interface issues like this make for additional usability concerns when switching question/answer display types.

Step 6: (Upsell time) Salad or Soup?

• I just completed 3 separate clicks to override Aussie Fries for a Salad, chose my salad type, then chose my salad dressing. Now I’m being asked if I want a side salad? This configurator is not intelligent enough to detect if you’ve already ordered what it’s asking you for.
• “Click add to order to proceed” is counter-intuitive. If I don’t want anything, then I shouldn’t be taking the action to “add to order” my “No soup or salad” option. A simple “no thanks, skip this option” would be more appropriate wording.

Step 7: Additional add-ons?

• I just got finished making it through 6 separate pages and I still have not added Baby Back Ribs to my order.
• Again, trying to up-sell without supporting photos of these “Add-on Mates”
• Like in step #6, counter-intuitive use of “click Add to Order to proceed”
• And the mysterious “special instructions” field still exists — I’m not sure what instructions I would add here? It would help if they provided examples of what information they would look for here.

Step 8: Completed Baby Back Ribs “configuration”

• 8 pages later and many more clicks than that, I have added Baby Back Ribs to my order. That’s quite a few clicks and now I’m really hungry.
• Other concerns about this page include:
  • Tax is only estimated and may vary by store location. There is technology available to accurately calculate tax for each individual store.
  • “No Add-On Mates, Thank you (click Add to Order to proceed” is an actual “option” on this order. This is not user-friendly.
  • Would like to see the ability to duplicate an item in the order

Overall User Experience Analysis

The non-standard navigation (split left & right columns), numerous clicks for ordering Baby Back Ribs, no indicator as to how many steps are in the process to configure an item on the order, and the overall lack of standard online shopping functions (photos, sorting by price/name, searching, etc.) put this site near the bottom of the “easy of use” list for me, personally.

Had this been a local mom & pop restaurant, I would have called in my order because I would not have trusted the website enough. Because Outback is a well-known brand name, I was able to look past these usability flaws and place my order online. I would speculate that by making usability improvements to eliminate these barriers, they would see more curbside orders being placed online and their call-in orders would decrease.

Product configurators should imitate real life guided selling

In the real world, if a waiter would have walked through the same set of questions I had answered on the website, it would have aggravated me: When I substituted the side salad for Aussie Fries, I should not have been asked again if I would’ve liked a side salad for an additional $2.50. This is where product configurators online need to reflect real-life scenarios and not function like a computer running through a list of questions.

Fortunately, most people “get” the restaurant ordering experience and can look past these usability flaws. However, for manufacturers and retailers selling products which consumers do not purchase often, product configurators must be highly intuitive, helpful, and be positioned to up-sell but most importantly to answer questions about the basic options being presented to consumers.

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• To build our mailing list?
• To “get more traffic” to our site?
• To increase average time spent on our site?
• To increase average pageviews per visit on our site?
• To get more new users to visit our site (no matter how qualified)?
• To get more followers on twitter?
• To get more fans on Facebook?

None of the above.

These are by-products of a marketing campaign. In fact, these are not even indicators to suggest positive or negative performance of a campaign. Why? Because they are not relevant to a consumer/customer. If these are listed as goals of a campaign then this is “marketing for the sake of marketing.”

What is relevant to a consumer/customer?

Growing your mailing list by 10% does nothing if that 10% never buys your products. Increasing time spent on your website does not suggest you’ve tapped a resource for new brand advocates, either (it may however suggest you’ve created additional roadblocks preventing site visitors from completing desired tasks in a short amount of time).

Meaningful messaging that triggers action leading to a conversion — this is marketing and it’s why we’re in business. Anything else is just noise that makes your brand irrelevant to your target audience.

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Above (via the Ford website): How is reading this much copy in a small, scrollable area convenient or easy for online shoppers?

This mentality reminds me of the early days of web development where print designers tried to make the transition to designing for the web without understanding the constraints and ways to leverage the web medium for interface design. A design would be done, printed and viewed for approval, and then the content would be crammed in to fit with the design aesthetic. This is not how the web works! Users scroll, websites offer interactive features, and there are ways to expand design templates elegantly.

Concern over “below the fold” syndrome

There’s a valid concern that content appearing “below the fold” (below the initially viewable area in the browser without scrolling) on a website is not seen and not clicked on as often. Usability and eye-tracking studies have proven this. However, in the below full-screen example, we’ve done a disservice to the end-user by putting copy into such a small, scrollable area that it renders it rather useless:

This is a case where the template design fails to accommodate the content on the site. When the template doesn’t work for the content, it results in usability issues. When you have supplemental content to display in an interface on a website, it’s best to leverage the benefits of the interactive medium. See the below example in our product configurator:

Above: Here we have more information available to further explain these options. So as to not overwhelm the end-user, we don’t want to always display all content on screen so we give them the option to “learn more.”

Above: After clicking “learn more,” we use an animation to give the effect that the “learn more” text is extending the length of the “inside mount” option. This is a much more elegant and user-friendly way of retaining the design aesthetic while maintaining the usability of the site. See it in action anywhere you see the “learn more” link.

Voice of the consumer should prevail

These design deficiencies really should get flushed out with “best practices” documentation and usability testing and the voice of the consumer or end-user should prevail. While its tempting for online product managers to create aesthetically-pleasing sites, this can’t get in the way of the usability and the reason why the consumer is visiting your site in the first place – for information to purchase. Impede their research and they’ll quickly be on another website looking at competitive products.

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In our household, I manage the bills. Years ago I installed Quicken on my Mac and used it as a central way for managing all of our finances: credit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts, investments, loans, etc. To this day, it is still the primary financial management software I use.

Since my wife was never one to enjoy talking about our bills, and because I had always done it, there was never really a way for her to easily become engaged in the process which she neither liked or, quite frankly, was good at! Then came along Mint.com.

I’m the DBA, she’s the business user

The relationship we’ve had prior to the use of Mint.com was very much like the DBA (Database Administrator) and the Business User requesting reports. Businesses with poor business intelligence and reporting solutions suffer from inundating DBAs (Database Administrators) with writing queries and developing custom reports every time a business user wants to see sales performance vs. a budget.

Without an easy-to-use reporting solution businesses suffer when Business Users are not engaged in analyzing data. The same was true here — Quicken, a desktop application, had no user-friendly way of distributing budgeting or reporting data on a regular basis to my wife. I had to be the one to generate it because, simply put, the user experience and usability was just not where it needed to be for her to be engaged.

Mint.com is the dashboard we needed for our personal finances

While my wife still doesn’t dare open Quicken to manage our finances, Mint.com offers us easy, straight-forward access to balance alerts and budgeting. What’s even better is the iPhone app where she can quickly pull up our budget for the month while she’s out shopping and have instant understanding of where we are financially. This, combined with weekly summaries of spending vs. budget puts our finances at her fingertips without the complexity of knowing how to use Quicken.

User experience & usability win, again.

The Mint.com model is proof that simplicity in an application that is easy to use is a winning combination. As was pointed out by adaptive path, Quicken’s acquisition of Mint.com this past week equated to $5 Million value per employee, making an incredible case of user experience being the winning anecdote to Mint.com’s success.

Take a complicated process, make it easy, and you will win.

Mint won our family over by taking the complication of weekly bills and budgeting by making it quick, fun, and easy to understand. Online businesses that focus on similar principles will trump their competition.

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I work in the home decor industry, blinds and shades in particular. The shopping process for understanding, selecting, ordering, and installing custom blinds and shades can be daunting if it’s unclear what is available to you as a consumer. Plus, when it comes to home decor and fashion, there is a lot of emotion involved — how you furnish your home says a lot about you and your family so the last thing you want to do is make a very expensive design mistake.

More Options = Better. Right?

Not necessarily. However, the Blinds and Shades industry is an old industry rooted in differentiation by product options and colors. In an industry determined to never be outdone by its competitors, window treatment manufacturers both benefit and suffer from being able to cater to the millions of variations of window sizes in consumers’ homes to the unique decor tastes of consumers laying down their hard-earned money. The engineering and manufacturing behind the products is complex, but when it comes to presenting an ordering screen to an untrained user, it’s a whole new challenge.

DIY Product Configuration & Ordering

The problem that has manifested is an industry offering such confusing products that only a designer or decorator could assist a consumer in purchasing. So, how does one create a website to help DIY’ers who choose to go at it on their own?

When taking all of the products, colors, options, and manufacturing limitations into consideration across 100+ billion ordering combinations, this makes for a very complex product configurator. Mocha or Chocolate colored finish? Inside or out-side mounted installation? Motorized or cordless control mechanism? What type of decor do you have in your room? What type of room will this blind or shade be installed in? If you’ve gone through the process of outfitting your home with new blinds, you know that it’s challenging.

Key components to a product configurator are all about usability

Usability in a product configurator means:

1. Showing options with photos or videos
2. Offering feature/benefit statements for each option
3. Categorize options into digestible steps
4. When a conflict is detected, provide messaging in plain English and in a relevant location.

Step 1: Showing options with photos or videos

One of the fundamentals. Consumers will buy what they can see. Case in point, here is a $1,530 “Track Pack” option on the Ford Mustang without pictures:

Step 2: Offering feature/benefit statements for each option

A couple years back I was looking at Ford Mustangs on Ford’s website. In the configurator, I was presented with an option of a rearend gear ratio of 3.73. I went back recently and took a screen shot of this because Ford is still doing it. What’s wrong with this picture?

I don’t know what the factory default rear axle ratio is. Being a “car guy,” I know the benefits of gearing up or gearing down, but without being able to compare this option to what’s offered by default, it’s hard to justify the $495 price tag. I have to leave the product configurator and search around on the site to see if they’ve listed the default rear axle ratio specifications somewhere.

Step 3: Categorize options into digestible steps

Oh, how it’s daunting to enter into a product configurator without an understanding of how many steps or questions there are to answer. Blinds and Shades in particular can be upwards of 25 questions just to get to a completed configuration. The tricky part is dividing the total number of questions into logical buckets or steps. Consumers do not configure products in linear fashion, particularly when comparing pricing online, changing options, and running into option conflicts. They hop around, jumping out of predefined order. It’s important to categorize questions so a consumer and quickly remember where they saw an option.

Step 4: When a conflict is detected, provide messaging in plain English and in a relevant location.

Again, Ford is on the right track by showing the conflict, but what is always difficult to decipher is the why behind conflicts like this:

What’s happened here is the 3.73 rear axle package is already included in the “Track Pack” option. In order to understand this however, I have to separately click on the “Track Pack” option and the “Rear Axle Package” option to see if I can come to my own conclusion as to why these two options cannot be ordered together.

In the case of blinds and shades, I’ve configured a Cellular Shade that is 83″ wide X 60″ tall:

I’ve chosen the “cordless top down/bottom up” option but I see an error message that explains the why behind the conflict, not simply “this option cannot be ordered.” It allows me to either alter my measurements on my shade or choose another control option. I don’t have to click around on the options to understand why this particular option cannot be ordered.

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With the pending release of The Beatles: Rock Band on September 9th, there are rumors of Apple finally striking a deal with The Beatles and releasing the band’s music on iTunes the same day. These Beatles/iTunes rumors have been around for some time and if there was any time to release The Beatles on iTunes, now is a better time than ever. Why?

In December 2007, Nieselson SoundScan revealed that songs on the “set list” of Guitar Hero III and Rock Band saw an increase in digital purchases anywhere from 15% to 847%.  In essence, Rock Band and Guitar Hero essentially become entertaining advertising vehicles for bands and recording labels.

It’s no secret that the release of The Beatles on iTunes would do quite well just with the Apple PR machine powering it. However, Apple’s efforts plus a release of The Beatles:Rock Band would certainly be a home run.

It’s fascinating to see how a new product (Guitar Hero or Rock Band) can drive incremental sales in other channels of business (digital music).

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In January this year I was doing an analysis on the traffic sources to the hobby-based site I run (SuperMotors). Since we run the site as a hobby, it must pay for itself via direct subscriber fees and advertising revenue (on a CPM basis). From ad revenue standpoint, more traffic to the site equates to more revenue. Simply increasing the pageviews that existing traffic is already making is not enough in a CPM environment because ad networks will optimize ads to show less frequently to visits/sessions that have already seen their ads. Instead, we needed to look at creative ways in drawing in more visits to the site.

Referring search traffic is a significant driver in website traffic

What I found over an 8-month period — I knew it was the leading referrer in traffic, but it was surprising to see that it was the leader by a clear mile — was Google Organic search was driving over 37% of traffic to our site. The next closest traffic referrer was only at 11.7%.

Google’s search index of our site (in January ’09): 56,800 pages

Perform a Google search on your site index with this query: site:www.yoursite.com . In the case of SuperMotors, the 37% of traffic being driven by organic results in Google was a result of 56,800 pages in the Google index for www.supermotors.net. Not bad, but when compared to competing enthusiast sites who had indexes in the several hundred thousands, it was substantially low.

Bottom line: we were missing out on revenue opportunities by having a small natural search index.

Google Webmaster Tools: Adding Sitemaps

Sitemaps are the single most cost-effective way at increasing search visibility for your site with Google and getting additional, free organic traffic driven to your site. The premise is simple: the more content that Google indexes from your site, the more keyword hits there will be for your site. Rankings of these pages are another story altogether, but long tail search can account for a substantial portion of traffic being driven to your site. Here’s the link to Google’s webmaster tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Here is a screenshot of one of our sitemap indexes (for photos posted by our members), there are 11 separate pages each with 50,000 records each:

Even 8 months after submitted this Sitemap, of the 529,979 unique URLs submitted, Google has still only indexed 339,578 or 64% of them. Over time, this figure will continue to grow as the Googlebot absorbs more and more pages out of the Sitemaps.

Google’s search index (8 months later) of our site after adding Sitemaps: 1,200,000 pages

For the past 8 months, the Googlebot has been methodically inhaling more and more pages from our various sitemaps to increase our searchable index for SuperMotors.net in the Google Search index. Our search index increased from 56,800 to 1,200,000 — a 2100% increase in indexed content free of charge.

Your results will vary — we have a lot of user-generated content and the 1,200,000 million pages represents forum messages, pictures, sounds, and videos posted by 10′s of thousands of members over several years. For sites without user generated content, indexed content will probably be much lower — and this is OK. Apple.com for example, has approximately 115,000 indexed pages in Google at the time of this writing.

Referring organic Google visits have increased 5.76%

As the result of simply adding Sitemaps and telling Google about them via the Webmaster Tools page, we have seen a 5.76% increase in organic visits from Google. All other things equal, when you increase site visits by any percentage free of charge, this will result in increased revenues from CPM advertising programs. Or in the case of e-commerce/retail sites, this should increase online sales provided that you’re converting these visits at the same rate as other visits.

Look at some of your favorite websites in Google’s search index — impressive results or not really? When you have a big brand name, you may not spend as much effort in the Sitemaps arena. However, organic search is highly qualified traffic because someone has searched for a keyword that you have on your site. Increasing your search index size is the first step in taking share away from your competitors online. Optimizing the content on those pages is another tactic altogether — but content optimization won’t matter if Google doesn’t know the page exists on your site.

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