Designing customer journeys (Ecommerce Lecture 5)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 29, 2009 [1600 views]

Video from Jonathan Briggs on Vimeo.

In this lecture we will look at how customers use eCommerce sites, where they start their shopping journeys, why they often abandon their purchase and how to design a site to maximise its effectiveness.

Here are the slides for today's lecture: Customer Journeys (1.1 MB)

Where do customers start?

1. Customers start with a need: a problem, a brand, an idea for a purchase, a search
2. Many will use the Web to try to find information or a product to satisfy that need
3. Some will remember the URL for a website; many will use a search engine
4. Some will come straight to your site; many will be referred from other sites
5. Some will only look at your site; most will look at many sites including your competitors

Not all visitors are looking to buy

1. Some are researching a future purchase
2. Students may be looking for images or information for a project
3. Suppliers may be looking for new sales outlets or business partners
4. High street shoppers may want to complain or find store opening hours
5. Lots of people are comparing brands, products, delivery times (availability), specs and prices
6. Some people want to keep in touch with what their “brands” are doing: celebrity links, news, offers, new products

Where do visitors arrive at your site?

1. Home pages: the core “brand” page. Needs to help them find what they are looking for as quickly as possible
2. Product pages: they looked for X in Google and found X on your site
3. Information or brochure pages: editorial content (reviews, blogs,
4. Landing pages: alternative starting points to the home page arranged around an audience or theme
5. Offer pages: special landing pages based around a particular promotion

How does this affect design of eCommerce sites?

1. List the specific needs of the customers for the specific site
2. Research what competitors do well or badly (look for opportunities to do better)
3. Develop visitor “personae” describing the features of likely customers thinking about what is special or different about them Using a customer persona
4. Define ways of converting visitors into shoppers (now or later): newsletters, RSS feeds, sign up for offers
5. Define ways of converting shoppers into repeat shoppers (worth more): VIP status
6. Draw out the journeys that you expect customers to take
7. Look to remove any barriers to shopping or interacting: errors, pop-ups, registration, loops, add reassurance about common worries (security, delivery, trust, privacy)
8. Develop strong calls to action
9. Design navigation to make it easy to move the customer forwards through the process: “avoid the back button of death”
   User behaviour and Purchase Decisions in E-Commerce

Elements of a customer journey

1. Starting point: Google search result, directory, advert, affiliate, email, review, direct
2. Entry point: core page (home), landing page, article page, product page
3. Next steps: search, browse, follow “call to action”, add to basket, leave
4. Leave to: competitor, back to Google, remember that they may come back
5. Search results: filter, search again, no results”, explore
6. Decision support: gift finder, reviews, product guide, compare products
7. Follow “call to action”: checkout, sign-up, enter competition, send to a friend
8. Checkout: Register/Login, Customer details, Delivery details, Gift wrapping, Payment Details, Confirmation, Thank You
9. Where next?

Why do customers not buy?

1. Only 1-8% of visitors will make a purchase on a website
2. Only 30-50% of those who put things in their basket will buy
3. Customers window shop (trying out the process)
4. Customers leave when they encounter problems, confusion, errors or doubt
5. They often have multiple tabs/windows open and are comparing prices, availability and service
6. Customers research online and buy offline
7. They hate being made to work or wait

Customer journeys and wireframes

1. Wireframes show navigation, content and functionality
2. Wireframes may be animated with software or an HTML prototype: Powerpoint, ConceptDraw, Viseo, OmniGraffle
3. Wireframes may or may not be used to define layout
4. A set of wireframes will illustrate the steps in the customer journey (for a particular persona)
5. Wireframe journeys allow the basic working of the site to be “signed off” before the site is built
6. They allow the logic of the site to be explored before implementation costs are incurred

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_wireframe
http://www.gliffy.com/wireframe-software/

Example customer persona for a jewellers

1. Karen is 21 and is engaged to be married
2. She wants to show her boyfriend, Gary, the types of wedding rings she really loves
3. She has not bought much from the web although she uses Facebook a lot
4. She is a bit afraid of using her credit card online
5. Karen wants Gary to spend a thousand pounds on a ring – he can afford it
6. She wants to let him make the final choice so that it is a surprise

Some things that might come out from this persona

• Searching for wedding rings
• Landing page for wedding rings
• Sort by price
• Group by style
• Send to a friend
• Reassurance and trust
• FaceBook marketing?

Learn to develop personae

1. Develop 3 or 4 very different personae
2. Separate by age, job, motivation, needs
3. Consider their familiarity with the brand
4. Consider their needs and worries
5. Define their personal customer journey

Some common useful personae components

• Unfamiliar with the brand – new customer
• Price sensitive
• “I know what I want and want it fast”
• Researching the best product
• Looking for news stories, project information, jobs

What do you think?

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