Feedback on eCommerce Activity 5 on Customer Journeys

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

November 14, 2009 [907 views]

Some of you took this very seriously while others did not really understand it at all. I enjoyed reading the persona - especially the one who had “hates muggles” as part of the character (you have a future as a user experience designer)!

User centred design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design, of which this is an important part is playing a key role in the development of effective online customer experiences (and product design) and some of you clearly see why.

Here are the questions you raised with some comments:

Is this kind of design method viable for smaller ecommerce stores? Surely it is very expensive to develop a site that makes a verity of complex customer journeys possible?

Small companies will sometimes use tools like Shopify that have already thought through the basic customer journeys as part of the design of the system. As they get bigger they will want to redesign the sites around more of their individual customers.

I really don’t get what persona means

Can you see the difference between a customer who wants to buy a particular TV as quickly as possible and one who wants lots of help in choosing a particular model to meet their needs? Personae are used to describe the differences between these two types of customer and with those characteristics set out a site can be built that supports both different types of customer with different paths through the site.

When describing a customer journey, are you supposed to give details of all possible paths to the purchase of a product or do you base it on the individual customer persona?

How much you do will depend on the client and the budget. You cannot possibly explore all possible paths but working with the client you want to make sure that you have covered all the main types of customer. 4-5 is common for our projects.

Can you show us a project in the real world as to how the journey design is implemented in terms of programming?

Don’t think of this as programming in the first place. This is about the “information architecture” for the site. You are using the customer journeys to lay out how pages within an ecommerce site will be arranged and how the navigation and content should be arranged. Only when that has been completed will you start to think about implementation. As to the real world, I know that most serious web design agencies now incorporate these techniques into their design process.

Why does it matter to think about the customer journey? Why should I as web designer base my design on this investigation? Does it matter to me or to the clients and will its improve the web optimization, increase trafic and improve potential customers visit and satisfaction and purchase?

Quite a few of you imagine that web design is about you coming up with your ideas independently of thinking about the customer and I really want to advise you that is not the case. This is perhaps one of the two biggest lessons from this module and the other, continuous optimisation, is going to be the topic of the next few weeks.

User centred design can make a huge difference to the customer experience and as many sites have demonstrated this can have a big effect on customer satisfaction and results.

Would you consider an ecommerce website without guided navigation really good sites? Would it be difficult to create a type of navigational guidance system as a final year project?

Guided navigation is only suited to certain types of ecommerce sites where there are lots of products available in lots of different sizes, styles, prices or configurations. Other sites will use improved search or product recommendations to guide the customer to the right products.

I would consider developing a guided product navigation system as a suitable FYP for the right client.

Is it possible to really improve the website like Argos or Ocado?

Yes. Amazon has proven that almost every store/site can be optimised through experimentation and testing. Customer expectations continue to change online as new technologies and ideas get added to the mix. Reviews and social media are currently important to stores as customers look to see what other people are buying.

How can Ocado afford every hour slot delivery and Argos cannot? Argos has many more stores and warehouses and probably more customers and it should be easier for them to do so shouldn't it?

Ocado built its entire business process model around it's delivery while Argos is having to bolt on delivery to its existing warehousing and retail models. We would need to look at the patterns of delivery for Argos which may be much less regular or geographically concentrated than Ocado. Think about why Fedex and DHL cannot offer timed deliver slots. Is Argos more like them? I think we will see timed delivery become more common but it is expensive to offer and needs deep knowledge of road timings, traffic models and customer behaviour.

Is there a correct answer to any question or issue within e-commerce area or it all depens on point of view?

This is a “design” discipline and design is often subjective. What we have is a set of proven tools and techniques that can be applied over and over again. Your question is a bit like asking whether architecture is correct. Of course you need to make sure that the steel beams you use to hold up a building meet the technical specifications and regulations so some things are “correct”.

In ecommerce this level of correctness applies to many things including payment integration, browser standards, legal requirements and order processing. Many other things will not be so cut and dried.

On several occasions, you have said you use Ocado - what particular qualities do you feel the site possesses that helps with your customer journey?

A good question. I like using Ocado because it has taken into account many aspects of my shopping behavior (they have designed journeys for people like me):

It remembers what I bought in the past and makes it easy to build a new order from that history
Ocado recommends similar products and matching products that do seem to fit with what I buy
The navigation is very intuitive and guides me to the things I buy
It is very uncluttered and presents a high quality feel that is very in keeping with the Waitrose brand
Their business processes work including delivery, substitution and reminders
Their email marketing does not feel obtrusive although it is extremely frequent
They were the first in the UK to have an iPhone app and this suggests they understand who their typical customers are

Don’t imagine that persona are just used to design the visible parts of the site. They are used to match the behind the scenes processes to the expectations of different customer segments.

Is it possible for a site to just have one main persona? I have noticed that I am kind of writing the same persona for different people with just slight changes in their reason for visiting the site

It would be very unusual but I suppose possible. As I suggested in the lecture the following three starting points are usually possible: know the brand well offline, never heard of the brand, regular online customer.

How would you convince a client to include another persona for their website or increase functionality knowing that it will increase their turn over?

Another good question. I think I would do some analysis to see if any of the high value groups of customers have been ignored. Ideally I would look at their analytics (see this week’s activity) and identify the additional opportunities. My starting point might be landing page experimentation or email campaigns - these are easy ways to demonstrate that different customer groups take different journeys and once you have proved that then these journeys can be optimised.

What do you think?

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