The new realism of web site design

A shopper looking for a talking pedometer is different from a shopper looking for a leaf-and-pinecone wreath. That’s why specialty stores create atmospheres to reflect what their customers are seeking—and why web retailers today are doing the same. “Demographics really make a difference in how you design a site,” says Greg Sweeney, vice president and general manager of direct marketing at multi-channel retailer Brookstone Inc.

Differentiation based on customers or products wasn’t always the case when it came to retail web site design. Retailers adopted what the early industry considered best designs and applied them to their sites—whether they were retailing best designs or not. Today, though, retailers are focused on who their market is, how their web sites serve that market and what that means in sales, whether online or offline. “Site design is not about the wow! factor any more,” says Bridget Fahrland, executive creative director of Fry Inc., which designed the Brookstone sites.

Brookstone knows: The market for its flagship brand Brookstone, which sells talking pedometers, is different from the market for its subsidiary brand Gardeners Eden, which sells leaf-and-pinecone wreaths.

Thus the company adopted a much different design when it re-launched GardenersEden.com last month from the design it has used at Brookstone.com for going on two years.

Prompting the call to action

A few of the differences that the two audiences dictated: Brookstone has a more robust site search engine, Gardeners Eden has a broader array of categories to guide shoppers to the right product. Brookstone has a high-tech, innovative look; Gardeners Eden has a softer, warmer, homey feel. “Brookstone is more about the individual and how to make life more fun; Gardeners Eden is more about home comfort, how to make the world more secure and comfortable,” Sweeney says. “The designs reflect those differences.”

Brookstone’s sites are one example of the new care that retailers are bringing to their site designs these days. It’s all aimed at increasing conversion rates and sales. “Everything in design has to be a call to action,” says Scott James, director of marketing for PuraVida.com, an online seller of fair trade coffee and operator of a foundation that works in the Third World. “Everything has to be pushing people to put something in the shopping cart or to make a donation.” Pura Vida recently re-launched its site with help from design consultants NetConversions.

In addition to understanding their customers, as Brookstone is doing, retailers pay close attention to how the web site presents their brand and their products. Cataloger Miles Kimball, for instance, kept its brand uppermost in mind when it re-designed its site. Launched in July and created by Multimedia Live, the new MilesKimball.com mimics the brand as presented in the 55 million catalogs the Oshkosh, Wis.-based retailer mails annually. “We’re known for our catalog and we wanted to make sure the web site was very consistent with the brand,” says Joel Schunter, marketing manager. “The new site gives a clean, clear branding message.”

Among the elements that reinforce the brand is a navigation bar with categories that change colors as customers mouse over them. “All the categories in our catalog are color-coded and we wanted to reinforce that with the nav bar on the web site,” Schunter says.

Although it hadn’t launched the reporting mechanism for its new site by early fall, Miles Kimball was certain the new design has resulted in greater sales. “Based on the feedback we are getting from customers, we believe we have increased conversion rates,” Schunter says.

Thinking inside the box

At Godiva Chocolatier Inc., a large part of the focus is on the product. While Godiva.com has always contained gorgeous shots of candy, Godiva, in a modification of its design last fall, enhanced its product information by increasing detail about the contents and the appearance of gift boxes. The site includes a section where customers can view descriptions of the pieces of chocolate and find boxes that contain those pieces or they can view the contents of a box and learn more about the individual pieces. “You can find the pieces you like, then find a box that contains those pieces, or you can find a box you like and see what pieces are in it,” say Kim Land, vice president of Godiva Direct. “The guide is very important because people like to know what’s in a box.”

Godiva’s re-design by Fry also incorporates additional information about product packaging, including the ability to zoom in on details such as the bow or the ribbon on a box. “We saw conversions increase,” says Land, declining to provide details. “It’s hard to pinpoint it to one piece of functionality, but a lot of customers use that capability.”

Godiva’s re-design is also part of the trend toward more information on retail web sites, Fahrland says. “A couple of years ago, everyone thought it was not smart to have too much information on the web site,” she says. “But today customers are going to the web site for all the product information.”

For instance, Graco Children’s Products Inc.’s GracoBaby.com includes information about dimensions, weight, appropriate age, suggested uses and even a downloadable manual for baby strollers. “It’s not exciting, but it’s critical for people to get over the hurdle of buying online,” says Fry Inc. president David Fry.

More science

Today’s approach to site design is more of a science than it was in the past. For one thing, many changes are based on customer feedback. The changes at Godiva.com were the result of reviewing customers’ comments and questions coming into Godiva’s call and contact center. “Very often, people were asking for recommendations,” Land says. “We found it better to provide tools at the site so customers could make their decisions rather than have them call in or turn to live chat.”

Among the crucial changes was the addition of a Gift Selector section that allows a customer who needs to buy multiple gifts within a budget to enter into input fields the number of gifts, total budget and whether the gifts will go to a single address or multiple addresses. A price calculator then recommends products based on the cost of the merchandise and the shipping charges. The customer picks the product, adds to shopping cart and checks out. “It resulted in a significant increase in average order size and in the number of gifts to over 10 recipients,” Land says. “We made it really quick for people.”

Listening in is a good idea, Fahrland says. “Those who sit in on call centers know what customers want because they hear what customers are asking for,” she says.

Another way in which site designs are becoming more of a science is that retailers are measuring ever smaller metrics. “Over the last year, people have been focusing on smaller and smaller parts of their web sites,” says Ken Burke, president and CEO of design company Multimedia Live. “They’re ratcheting down to a really low level.”

For instance, when home furnishings retailer SurLaTable.com redesigned its site, it tested different wording and designs for its add to cart/purchase function. With NetConversions, it tested a hot “Buy Now” in a big circle, “Buy Now” in a small circle with a “Buy Now” hot link underneath, a hot “Add to Bag” in big letters, “Add to Bag” in small letters with an “Add to Bag” hotlink underneath, a hot “Purchase” in big letters, and “Purchase” with a “Purchase” hot link underneath it. The hot “Purchase” in big letters outpulled the control—the original hot “Buy Now” in a big circle—by 33.3%.

But if the number of retailers who are carefully testing their changes is going up, there is still a large number who are just watching what others are doing and grabbing those designs, says Harley Manning, principal analyst with Forrester Research Inc. “We see a lot of people copying their competition without understanding whether what their competition is doing makes sense for themselves,” Manning says. “When that happens, you end up with a bunch of dogs chasing each other in a circle; they’re not really going anywhere.”

The web is not well established enough yet so that retailers can adopt what their competitors are doing with any confidence that it’s the right thing, Manning says. “The limitation to just copying is that the web is still not very good,” he says. “Anyone who’s just copying is probably perpetuating as many bad things as good things.”

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However, retailers shouldn’t be too quick to undertake unique designs, Burke says. “If you don’t adhere to some basic design elements, people will get frustrated and leave,” he says. Two key elements, he says, are to have categories prominent on the home page, so customers know how to navigate, and to have the search box at the top right of the home page. “Consumers are adapting to standards on web sites,” Burke says, “and so retailers are migrating to them, at least to the point where they are open to considering what everyone else is doing.” (See box page 22.)

Architectural challenges

While level of detail about brand, product and customer is important to the success of a site, it pre-supposes a data structure that will allow a retailer to do something with the information in each of those areas. Retail web sites have come to realize that that means a lot of work upfront, Burke says. “Design is as much a function of architecture as it is of anything else,” he says. “If you just do design, you’ll be dead.”

A site’s architecture must take into account the levels of product categorization, the number of categories and the number of products in each category, designers say. The levels of categorization are a balancing act between merchandising needs and legitimate differences among products, Burke says. He encourages retailers to adopt no more than two levels—a main level, such as Men, Women and Children at an apparel site, and subcategories, such as Slacks, Shirts, Sweaters, Shoes. Also make sure that the categories make sense to the shopper. “Often, how retailers see products is different from how customers see products,” Fry says.

The ideal number of categories is five to seven, and they should not exceed nine, Burke says. That number is not arbitrary, but rather reflects studies about human cognitive abilities, experts say. A manageable number not only gives customers a quicker idea about how to find products, but also is more easily remembered and helps customers learn the site faster, Burke says. “If you put up 20 or 30 categories, people can’t figure out how to get around the site,” Burke says.

Finally, products should be evenly distributed among categories. The ideal number, Multimedia says, is 12-20, although as many as 30 are acceptable. Anything above 45 is too many, Multimedia says. “If you require seven pages of scrolling, customers will never see the seventh page,” Burke says. “That means you’ve not done a good job of categorization.”

Once the categorization is completed, retailers need to make sure they have thought through the rest of the site’s organization. For instance, one of the gravest sins that a retailer can commit, yet a practice that is still surprisingly widespread, is to return a “No results found” message to a search query, Burke says. “Don’t ever deliver a zero results page,” he admonishes. “Even when you get an error, give the customer something. You can say ‘Sorry, no results, but here’s something else to think about.’”

Broadband challenges

Similarly, he says, retailers need to pay more attention to their customer service pages. “Customer service pages are one of the most widely used sections of a web site,” he says. “So the design needs to be well thought-out, well organized, easy to get to and with all the information a customer will need.”

From now on, designers’ jobs will only get harder, most observers say. For one thing, there’s the phenomenon of rising expectations. A marketing executive of one online retailer recounts how excited he was when his site installed a guided search and navigation function, by which merchandisers can show customers the products they want to promote within the context of search results. The technology returned not just lists of results, but thumbnails of products artfully arranged on the page. When he showed it to his wife, her response was, “So what?” His spouse was an avid online shopper herself and the cutting-edge approach was nothing more than she thought web sites were already capable of.

But looming even more important is the spread of broadband Internet access. “Broadband raises the bar,” Fry says. “It requires more product shots, zoom capability so you can see textures of a fabric, say, and more product comparison tools.” Says Burke: “Broadband at home is huge and it’s gaining at record rates.”

If designers start creating sites that show a preference for broadband use rather than narrowband, then it may be back to the drawing boards for all retail web sites.

kurt@verticalwebmedia.com

Don’t forget the multi-channel shopper

In designing web sites, retailers need to keep multi-channel shoppers in mind—they use the site and, even if they don’t buy online, they are more important than the single-channel shoppers who do their research and purchasing online. “The multi-channel customer spends 30% to 40% more than the single channel customer,” says Greg Sweeney, vice president and general manager of direct marketing for Brookstone Inc. “50% of site traffic ends up going to the store.”

For that reason, making sure customers know they are shopping online at the same Brookstone that operates stores is important. “We try to be consistent from an integrated brand point of view,” Sweeney says.

While the importance of multi-channel customers has been widely known for at least two years, retailers are finally getting around to consciously making the multi-channel experience a part of their web site design, designers say. “More people are dedicating infrastructure and investments to multi-channel,” says David Fry, president of design firm Fry Inc.

One of the most important approaches to the multi-channel market that retailers are taking is store pick up and return of orders. “In-store return is becoming de rigueur and pick-up is at 40%; that eventually will be a must-have,” Fry says.

Further, retailers are tying their customer identification and loyalty programs across channels. “People are less and less patient with loyalty programs available in only one channel,” Fry says. “The airlines have nailed this but retailers still have quite a way to go.”

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