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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Furthermore, where these groups align is also a pressing question, and it’s something I’ve been searching for best practices on to understand how others are doing it successfully so we can position our organizational talent with career opportunities as well as establish a smooth operating rhythm.

Forrester’s E-Business Organization Research

Forrester has put together a handful of articles on this very topic in the past 24 months and have been the only research firm I’ve found specifically dedicating analysts to the topic of E-Business. A Google search on E-Business org charts leaves a lot to be desired, so I’m compiling this list of the most valuable Forrester Rsearch I’ve found to date:

Most recently, Best Practices in Organizing for eBusiness, finally provided examples of E-Business org charts at different companies. A couple older articles include Building Best-In-Class eBusiness Teams and Dissecting High-Performing eBusiness Organizations.

In the End, Org Structure Doesn’t Matter; E-Business Maturity Does

Forrester’s eBusiness Maturity Model was published in the Is your eBusiness Team Ready for Prime Time? article and is essentially what E-Business executives need to use to evaluate the strength of E-Business in their organization. The maturity model is broken down into four primary buckets:

1. People, organization, and culture
2. Business and technology process
3. Channel integration
4. Measurement and metrics

E-Business teams must essentially be tailored for how your organization does business. There is no right or wrong structure provided it meets your business needs and you consistently build upon the above four maturity areas.

For example, I work for a consumer products company in which we do a very small portion of business direct-to-consumer online but in the end, relationships with our retailers are what ultimately matters. Therefore, our E-Business team is typically focused on “ease of doing business” initiatives, marketing our products online, and learning how consumers shop online.

On the flip-side, a retailer who sells multiple branded products would have substantially more online merchandisers on its staff because their goal is to sell products.

Three Spheres of E-Business Execution

Now, when it comes to execution, there is a right and wrong way. Borrowing from Jeremiah Owyang’s Three Spheres of Web Strategy, these same three spheres of web strategy expertise are essentially the pillars of E-Business execution:

1. Community
2. Business
3. Technology

For reasons outlined in Jeremiah’s diagram, you can’t be missing one of these components and still have a successful execution.

The Secret Sauce for your E-Business Organization

Forrester’s 4-maturity-area model is an essential tool in long-term planning and growing talent in your E-Business organization. Jeremiah’s 3-sphere tactical model is where the rubber meets the road. E-Business can be a strategic advantage and you want to use these two models as guides for properly positioning E-Business within your organization. What works for another company may not work for your business and go-to-market strategy.

The single most important facet will be aligning with a C-level executive who either has a background or a willingness to learn and leverage E-Business as a competitive advantage. Without this, the E-Business team will fall into a rut of taking orders from business units without guidance on which projects are more important than others. The end result will be a resource-strapped, burned out team with no clear path for growth and no definitive business value to the organization other than “keeping the lights on.”

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Abandoning the purchase funnel

Having said that, I went through the multi-step validation process on Apple’s site, but it was unable to retrieve our account information from AT&T, to which I was prompted to search for a local Apple Store. Not needing to do this, I simply abandoned the purchase funnel with a mental note to “visit the store this weekend” since I hit a dead end on the site and wasn’t going to be able to complete the upgrade online.

Automated follow-up to purchase abandonments

About 15 minutes later, I received the following, automated email:

Very impressive — an automated follow-up recognizing that I abandoned the purchase funnel for the iPhone upgrade. I must say that I am not used to this type of marketing where the website acts like a true salesperson.

Technically speaking, it’s not difficult to implement this. It’s a perfect blend of leveraging technology to solve a business problem: how do you capture the consumer’s attention after they’ve left your site without making a purchase?

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We did however take liberties in updating products based on new product rollouts and added functionality that didn’t previous exist. Here are some before and after screen shots:

Product Navigation (Old)

Old site consisted of a 4-layer navigation schema:

1. Choose Product Category
2. Choose Product Type
3. Filter Product List (Choose 1 Finish, Style, and/or Collection)
4. View Product (See details, finishes, etc.)

The problem with this style of navigation is it forced the end-user to make too narrow their product selection too soon in the process just to see a product list. Finish coordination across product types is important in cabinet hardware, so the desire to see “all products with a satin nickel finish” needed to be possible. With the old site, this could not be done.

Above we see Decorative Hardware product types.

Here we see a product listing, but we can only choose from thedrop-down menus for further filtering options.

And here we see product details with finishes. Lots of unused real estate.

Product Navigation (new)

A simple 2-step process exists:

1. Choose Product Category (from the main navigation of the site)
2. Select multiple filters and see your product results

Select multiple filters across multiple filter types. An additional bonus is seeing the filter “counts” so there’s no guesswork when you’re clicking on options wondering if you will see any additional product results or not.

Clear visibility in the left-hand navigation of what filters are selected and which product results you’re viewing. Additionally, there are “results per page” options as well.

Product comparison also didn’t exist on the old site. It is now available on the new site.

Image zooming was also unavailable on the old site. Thanks to Adobe Scene7’s dynamic image zooming technology, we use it on all product pages to enable the end-user to zoom in on-the-fly on the product image.

Table Stakes

It seems odd to be showing some of the above features as they are mostly “table stakes” features these days. However, there are many large e-commerce sites that still do not offer simple things like product image zooming, unlimited product comparison functionality (do I really need to be limited to comparing 3 products at a time so the site design stays scaled proportionately?), and “results per page” customizations. Amerock.com is now fairly level-set with these “table stakes” features an we begin the continuous improvement with repeatable processes.

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What’s exposed when businesses merge

Previously, Amerock was grouped under a different Global Business Unit and run independently of operations at Levolor and Kirsch. The merging of these business units has presented an interesting challenge from a website strategy perspective. The challenges are not unique to us and the purpose of this post is to not outline the specific challenges we faced but rather to focus on the high-level areas that mergers and acquisitions will eventually uncover:

Business processes, software platforms, job responsibilities, and online strategy must adapt to the new environment.

Enterprise E-Business must be scalable

I am fortunate to manage a team of people who are eager to take on new challenges and responsibilities. What we quickly discovered as it related to our Online Platform was that it had all been built around a single business (blinds & shades). This meant some of the software was specific to business processes unique to Levolor and Kirsch but more specifically, our business processes were very tied to Levolor and Kirsch.

When Amerock was infused into the mix, we had to re-engineer several areas (listed below). I won’t go into how we modified these processes but at a high level, these were the core areas impacted:

Enterprise E-Business must function on repeatable processes

I cannot stress this enough particularly in the past few years in working in a Fortune 500 environment after coming from a small business of 20-25 employees. The enterprise is too massive for any one person to “know it all” so processes must be rigid, repeatable, with good people employed to manage through the processes and modify the processes when they identify deficiencies.

Tribal knowledge is acceptable in small business and is what enables small business to be agile. Tribal knowledge contaminates the enterprise, especially in the E-business arena. If an enterprise process cannot be repeated by more than one person without significant “hand holding,” then it is not a repeatable process. A merger or acquisition will quickly expose deficiencies in processes.

Scalable, repeatable processes does NOT equal inflexible online experience

Perhaps one area where IT folks get it wrong most often is deploying a scalable, repeatable process that limits creativity (particularly as it relates to an online experience). Scalable and repeatable processes must inherently have a mechanism for dealing with unique business requirements and the ongoing management of these “exceptions.” This is all the more reason why the E-Business/IT group needs a seat at the (business strategy) table. Without knowing the direction of the business, it is impossible to anticipate every possible scenario and build scalable, repeatable processes that will last.

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Frustrated by Difficulty, Half of Marketers Forgo Analytics

Marketers will continue to invest significantly in online marketing this year, but less than half (47%) actually use analytics to measure their campaigns, and one-fifth only have a ‘basic’ website, according to the sixth annual marketing survey from Alterian (via MarketingCharts).

A marketing department can be a competitive advantage, but only if marketers understand how to measure campaign effectiveness.

Marketing budgets are usually the first to get trimmed in difficult economic times and it’s no surprise with over half of marketers not being able to tie a return (in revenue, customer satisfaction, brand awareness, etc.) to marketing dollars invested. A CFO at any company is going to quickly zero-in on this spending and cut what they don’t understand and certainly what isn’t being measured.

Are you measuring the effectiveness of your website with web analytics?

Free analytics tools readily available from Google and Yahoo! allow you to jump right in. But, it’s not just the access to the technology that will help derive value from marketing investments; ultimately, it’s accountability and the desire to continually improve your campaigns. Without either of these two characteristics, then you’re just viewed as an “expense” that can eventually be cut.

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There was a good post and subsequent discussion started at this blog asking “Why do enterprise applications suck?”

There is no disputing that most enterprise apps are terrible. Let’s examine why:

1. Enterprise applications span careers. Very rarely do you get an opportunity to start at ground zero in the enterprise with an application. Web startups have the luxury of starting with a blank sheet of paper. In the enterprise, you’re either integrating with legacy systems or building on existing processes that are engrained in the business. Furthermore, long-tenured “champions” are hard to come by as it relates to enterprise applications which brings me to my next point:
2. Enterprise applications are inherited. In my case, I’ve inherited a handful of applications from predecessors who inherited applications from their predecessors. Often times in the enterprise, applications that have been in production have years of usage behind them and are tightly woven into day-to-day business processes. Well, there must be documentation on how the software operates, right? Not quite.
3. Enterprise applications are wide in focus. Most web-based startups are narrow in their focus. In the enterprise, one solution rarely fits all needs and business processes, so you’re forced to do patchwork between disparate technologies. The startups that try to be “all things to all people” ultimately fail. Look at these lists of startups out of TechStars and you’ll find that they’re all laser-beam focused. Enterprise application providers are selling “one size fits all” solutions to corporate clients, so don’t plan on there being a community of “theme developers” for your enterprise app like there are for Wordpress blogs.
4. In the early days, the enterprise valued function over form. Looking back as little as 5 years ago, companies were still just discovering web technologies. When going from a manual, paper-based process to your first automated, electronic solution, everyone’s going to love it. Fast forward a few years and here we are, usability stewards with high expectations of web application usability. We’ve been spoiled with free services from the Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and other online entities.

There’s a paradigm shift taking place with the expectations of applications

The evolving nature of web applications is no different than any other maturing industry. Automotive manufacturers experienced the same challenges. Early automobiles valued function: getting you from point A to point B. As that became the standard, automobiles had to differentiate on other features. Early enterprise applications valued function, however in the world of applications, advancements are not measured in decades like automobiles, they are measured in years or even months.

The enterprise will catch up.

Just like most consumers don’t rush out and buy the latest car or truck to take advantage of the latest and greatest innovations from the manufacturer, enterprises aren’t going to invest in software upgrades that don’t promise increased top-line sales or improved bottom line results.

That 1999 model year vehicle still serves its purpose — insurance is cheap, you have no car payments, and it still runs despite the occasional service it requires. The bells and whistles in new automobiles sure are attractive but they just aren’t enough to sway you to make the plunge for a new automobile. The same thinking is taking place in the enterprise with regards to the applications the organization invested in years ago.

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I was happy to read that Talend secured $12 Million in funding. We’ve long been a proponent of Talend, beginning in early 2008 completely gutting home-grown ETL and Middleware applications and processes by leveraging the open source tool. With quotes on ETL software from the big boys coming in north of $200K, the open source investment (we essentially pay for a “pro” version of the server along with enterprise support — substantially less than $200K).

There is a place for open source in the enterprise. As development shops seek to be more agile, budget-conscious, and innovative this year, the ability to move quickly and without the sometimes bureaucratic-funding-approval-process is important. “Do more with less” remains an important mantra in ‘09 in IT just as it did in ‘08.

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As someone with a MacBook Pro (for business) running OS X and VMWare Fusion for Windows XP & Windows 2000, an iMac (for home), Blackberry (Business & Gmail access), and random access to the Internet anywhere else I go, it only takes one instance where you’re on a device without your latest and greatest contact information. My Gmail contact list was the last missing link in the plethora of address books spread across all of these devices.

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