There was a Service Design Supplement in the Guardian this morning!

It’s great to see some publicity being given to Service Design, with the Guardian (my favourite paper) creating a ten page supplement. Customer Journey Mapping is one of the tools used by service designers, and to me it is the link between Web 1.0 usability and customer experience, and a more rounded multi-channel view of online as part of a Customer Journey delivering system with synchronised and coordinated channels.

Go to the Guardian website here, or download your PDF from the Service Design Network website.

The idea that there might be a standardised, genericised customer journey is frustrating and exasperating! If we could in actuality apply a standard sales process to e-commerce, wouldn’t it have been done it by now?

It’s not as easy as that. And this is a good thing because it means that a well designed customer journey that really fits the buying process can make significantly more sales for the business and satisfaction for the customer.

I think the real world customer journey critically depends on:

• The type of product, and what is attractive about it
• The customers motivation
• The customers mindset and context

Let’s test this. Let’s take a standardised, genericised view of the world, as embodied in Jakob Neilsen’s Top Ten Homepage Guidelines and look to see if they are useful or not. And let’s take a hard one, on that looks obvious, like:

Usability guideline No. 5 “Include a Search Input Box”

Obviously true? Not  necessarily. Not when you look harder. Different customers buying different products take different customer journeys. When you think about it, it is not obvious that a simple search box is always appropriate.

If you are a retailer (or designing for a retailer), you might consider these questions, for starters:

• Why a search box at all, when would my customer use it?
• What would my customer type in?
• What would my customer expect the results to look like?

The answers to these questions will inform a retailers strategy to support your particular customers journey, support their buying process, their needs. It is not just about the simple presence or absence of a widget on a website. To illustrate, let’s take three examples…

Frocks

Different Frock sellers might have quite different views of search, depending on their product sales strategy. One view might be to embrace search and develop it using knowledge of what customers were searching for. Next prioritise search in a very visible box, white out of black, at the top of very colourful page, with results being presented in a ‘boxy’ visual style.

But a different view might be to have a preference for navigation and browse over search, believing that the emotional impact of seeing the right item in the best possible presentation is the key to making a sale. This sales strategy might include a deprioritised search box, out of sight at the top right blind spot, like net-a-porter . The pages of frocks here are beautifully presented as if on a rail, and the navigation includes items like ‘designers’, ’boutiques’, as opposed to Next‘s ‘Women’, ‘Men’, ‘Shoes’, ‘Sports’ …

Which is right? Well, both, because they are both thought-through sales strategies that target different markets using different designed experiences to sell to different customers with different intents.

Fridges

Fridges are different to Frocks, and have little emotional connection for most of us, so filter down search is an excellent option over browse. And this time it must be search with all the possible bells, whistles and comparison data, like Currys provide. Size, capacity, eco-rating, etc… all contribute to our purchase decision.

Fridges are a rational purchase, which are made logically and driven by data. Fridges are not frocks, and the customer journey and decision criteria are just not the same.

Flowers

And Flowers, would anyone search for flowers? I’d say it was unlikely. The key difference for flowers is that it is a purchase for someone else and the decision will likely be decided by budget, availability and delivery. In fact, size, shape, and even colour might not be important.

The browse bias of flowersdirect provides a great support for this customer journey with an effective backup deprioritised search for those needing something specific.

To Search or Not to Search?

Where does this leave Jakob’s No.5 – “Include a Search Input Box”? It seems this is not as straightforward as it initially seemed.

Search should be included if it supports the customer journey, and your sales strategy. But access can be controlled by visually prioritising and deprioritising, and presenting results that fit the way you want to sell.

This is good for those involved in designing, improving and optimising the customer journey because it gives us an opportunity to use creativity, colour, copy and customer insight to make more sales for businesses and better experiences for customers.

When an internet retailer of any description is looking to increase sales, the first place to look for improvements is the checkout process. Because once a customer has made it to the checkout they simply want to pay.

And what you shouldn’t do at such a special retail moment is distract the deliriously happy customer with other marvelous things to look at and other great places to go. Obvious, really, quite obvious. Can you imagine the furore in Sainsburys if an assistant dragged off the person at the head of the checkout queue to show them some absolutely brilliant TV bargains! “Now you just must come and see these!”

A funnel. Only one way out. No links, no distractions.

On the internet distractions happen all the time. After all, it’s what the internet is about, a self-directed search for content (informational or product). But to sell efficiently, you need to break internet rules, remove all the distractions and make a funnel. Thats right. A funnel. Only one way out. No links, no distractions.

I remember when I suggested this approach to a well established internet retailer in 2000 they thought I was insane. “Surely”, they said “you cannot be serious when you say remove the link to the bundle of towels from the credit card details page?!” Of course I was serious! Remove ‘em all, I said. But they didn’t. They hadn’t seen the light.

And when you have seen the light it’s actually very easy. Do it yourself. You don’t need my help in this apart from this initial Road to Damascus Experience. Print screens of all your checkout process from the place users first click ‘Checkout’ and simply cross out all the links, yes, all of them except the one that goes to and through the checkout. Then pass the prints to your developers and tell them to remove the links you’ve crossed out, and to ask no questions. You won’t regret it. The harder you are on
distractions, the more your customers will actually buy. That’s usability at the checkout in retail, funnel to get sales.