Contents:
- Letter from the Editor: Doesn't Look Good for Search
- Meeting Announcement: Seattle Area
- Feature: Determining How Design Affects Branding
- User Interface 6 West Conference
- From the Mailbag
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--> Letter from the Editor: Doesn't Look Good for Search
Greetings,
I know you like to hear about our latest findings. So, here are some from our most recent study of 170 shopping expeditions on 13 apparel and home goods sites:
1) The more users used Search, the less they purchased. 2) Users waited, on average, three clicks into the site before attempting to use Search. 3) The more users used Search, the worse they rated the site. 4) The more users used Search, the less they told us they'd return to shop on the site again. 5) The more previous experience a user had with a site, the less they used Search on that site. 6) Two of the study's best performing sites, the Gap and Old Navy, have *no* Search feature. (And the users didn't notice.)
In fact, there are very few (read 'zero') good things we can say about Search in this study. Search did better in previous studies, where we tested sites selling CD's and videos, but with sites selling apparel and home goods, Search seems to fail miserably.
I know I'll get more angry mail from the search engine software vendors for saying this, but it doesn't look good for Search. Maybe the Gap and Old Navy have it right: don't waste your time on providing Search.
We'll go into much more detail on this during the UIE Research Forum on March 21st as part of the User Interface 6 West conference. (You can get more information on the conference at http://www.uiconf.com.)
As soon as we gather more exciting findings from this and other studies, we'll let you know. We always love hearing from you, so feel free to send us your thoughts and comments to uie@uie.com.
Jared M. Spool
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-> Meeting Announcement
For those of you who will be in the Seattle area on February 13th, Jared Spool will speak to a special joint meeting of the PS SIGCHI chapter and the WSA Internet Business SIG.
The topic will be Designing for Revenue: Using Research to Fulfill Business Goals. The evening goes from 6:00pm - 9:00pm (the presentation starts at 7:00pm) and is free to the public.
See http://www.wsa1.org/events/event.asp?EventID=110 for more info and directions to the meeting location at Attachmate Corporation.
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-> Feature: Determining How Design Affects Branding
Designers often tell us part of their responsibilities is to enhance the branding of a site, product, or organization. In recent years, we've focused our research on understanding how design can have a positive effect on a brand.
In our research, we've learned that brands are an investment instrument. With a savings account, money is deposited so that interest accrues -- the investment grows over time.
Similarly, with branding, money is spent on building the perception of the brand with individuals -- we call this: strengthening the brand. At some point, the brand will be strong enough to have a serious effect on an individual's purchase behavior, such as paying more for a product because it's a "brand I trust."
For an individual, brands are a perception. Harvard University is a brand. Many people perceive Harvard University as an outstanding educational institution. Many people also perceive Harvard University as being extremely expensive. These two perceptions (among others) make up Harvard's brand.
Brand elements, such as names, logos, tag lines, trademarks, and packaging, are shortcuts to those perceptions. People use these shortcuts when making purchase decisions. For example, if a consumer has a perception that the film produced by Kodak makes better pictures, they'll use the Kodak logo and trademarks as a shortcut to decide which product to purchase.
We are currently studying what designers can do to strengthen brands and create the shortcuts between brand elements and individuals' brand perceptions. For example, on e-commerce sites a strong site brand could translate into repeat sales. During a customer's initial visit, what could designers do to strengthen the site's brand so that the shopper returns to the site for future purchases?
In recent studies, we've been measuring the strength of key brands at predetermined points in the user's online experience with a site. We've been trying to see if we can spot a correlation between design elements and changes in the strength of these brands.
Our initial results are very encouraging. We've found that when people are done shopping on certain e-commerce sites, they're perceptions of the brand are often strengthened, while other sites seem to consistently weaken their brands.
For example, in a recent study of apparel and home goods sites, we found that when people shopped on the sites for the Gap and Lands' End, their perceptions of those brands were more positive after the shopping experience than before. In the same study, shoppers on Macys.com consistently reported that their attitudes towards the Macy's brand were substantially reduced after their experience than before.
It could be that the Gap and Lands' End offer better quality products than Macy's, and that's why we saw the difference in attitude changes. However, when we asked the shoppers about the quality of the products, they basically rated them all equivalently.
In reviewing our data from the study, we found some fascinating correlations:
o Shoppers interested in specific products were more likely to purchase those products on the Gap's and Lands' End's sites than on Macy's site. In fact, across the 13 sites in the study, purchasing the products the shoppers were seeking correlated very highly with brand strength. The more shoppers could purchase their desired products, the more their positive attitudes about the site's brand increased.
o The usage of certain design elements correlated very strongly with people's brand attitude changes. For example, shoppers who used size charts while buying apparel were more likely to show brand strength increases on those sites. While shoppers who used Search correlated strongly with decreases in brand strength.
These two findings tell us that when we create designs that focus on ensuring users accomplish their goals, we are likely having a long-term positive effect on the strength of the brand.
This also helps us understand why sites that have always focused on helping users accomplish their goals are now reporting profits. Amazon and eBay (eBay has always been profitable) spend a lot of their development effort innovating new designs elements that ensure users achieve what they come to the site for. Whereas, companies like Boo.com and Pets.com, who spent millions on advertising campaigns, failed to strengthen their brand.
We're very encouraged by our initial findings. We believe that we're on the trail to identifying how designers can affect the strengthening of brands. From this, we can calculate ROI using the investment in a design and the return that comes from brand strength.
[You can learn more about our latest techniques for measuring brand strength at the UIE Research Forum on March 21st in Burlingame, CA. http://www.uiconf.com.]
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-> User Interface 6 West Conference
We've only been taking registrations for a few days and already we've had an overwhelming response to our upcoming conference. We're thinking this could be a sell-out event.
We can understand why, with the UIE Research Team presenting their latest research at the UIE Research Forum. Not to mention, the full-day seminars being given by world experts, such as Nick Usborne, Karen Holtzblatt, Mitch McCasland, Peter Merholz, Erric Solomon, Keven Mullet, Gerry McGovern, and Kim Goodwin.
If you're even considering coming to the entire event, then you'll want to go to http://www.uiconf.com and make sure you register before the end of the day on Wednesday, February 13th. That way you'll save more than $2,200 off of the final registration price.
This event is not to be missed. See you there!
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-> From the Mailbag
In response to our last UIEtips on the Customer Sieve (http://world.std.com/~uieweb/Articles/customer_sieve.htm), where we discussed how the shopping process eliminates potential customers, our favorite friend in Paris, Fred Fuchs, sent us this note:
I didn't have the figures you gave in your last UIE Tips ("Customer Sieve"). So far, I used figures I found in a French Newspaper (Internet Professionnel). Here they are:
Percentage of customers remaining AFTER each stage of shopping :
Home page: 100 % Search results: 75 % Product description: 55 % Order form: 31 % Buy product: 21 %
To show these results, I made a graphic inspired by the one about the losses of the French army during the Russian campaign in 1812. I found this graphic in a book by Tufte. I think that presenting the graphic about Napoleon's soldier losses, then the customer losses would be very dramatic. I didn't dare to do that so far, but maybe I will one day - depending on the audience.
(You can see a copy of C. J. Minard's Napoleon's March by visiting http://www.edwardtufte.com and clicking on the Posters and Graph Paper link.)
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At one of our favorite hangouts, Christina Wodtke's Elegant Hack, we got into a discussion on trust and design. (http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/002241.html#002241)
In talking about the presentation of a design, Christina inquired:
How much does a slick veneer influence trust? A professional facade?
to which our Jared Spool replied:
You've hit right onto one of our current ongoing research projects: credibility and trust. I'm on the board of advisors for Consumer WebWatch [part of Consumers Union, the folks who publish Consumer Reports]. We've been looking into this exact question.
Ben Shneiderman defines trust as a "positive expectation about the future based on past performance and truthful guarantees".
When someone doesn't have past performance with an entity (a web site, a business, an individual) to go by, then they need external immediate experience to guide them.
You go to a Doctor's office. It's dirty and the roof is leaking. Bugs and rats are visible and not scared by the waiting patients. Lots of patients are in the waiting room, crying in pain. You hear screams from the other side of the door. When the doctor finally comes out to get the next patient, you see that he's dirty and disgusting.
Even though you have no previous experience with this doctor, the "veneer" of this environment might lead you to not trust him.
However, if the last time you felt ill, this dirty, disgusting doctor made you feel wonderful instantly, you might be willing to overlook the veneer and trust him purely based on your experience.
That's our experience with watching people on the web. Veneer will make a difference when there is no previous experience to go by.
However, the quality of a veneer is a contextual perspective. Things that look crude to a very experienced graphic designer might look advanced to someone with no technology or design experience. eBay users who don't use the web for any other purpose do not see how crude the pages on eBay are. To them, eBay is the pinnacle of design aesthetic.
So, our research says that the veneer/trust issue is extremely audience dependent.
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