How the right personnel with the right skills make a web site rise above the pack
By Doug van Duyne
What makes great e-commerce sites great? Is it the best tech, the best design, the best ideas? It is all of these, but it is not just them. A missing element as many retailers develop their web strategies and analyze their successes and failures is the people who are behind the tech, design and ideas. What you and your team do to recognize issues and fix them will separate your business from your competition.
E-commerce is maturing now, and the problems faced by today's site managers are the same ones faced by any industry as it matures: More people are starting to care about things like value, convenience, and ease of use over the novelty of the technology.
Getting the best team
But who comes up with the ideas, creates value, makes the site easier to use, and writes the software? I have spent years managing the development of e-commerce sites, as well as studying e-commerce customers and successful e-businesses and researching and writing The Design of Sites, and I have learned the two most important factors in managing successful e-commerce sites. Customer focus, solid technology, compelling design and an e-commerce site with a great business model all come as a result of bringing together the best team and organizing and managing the team to its fullest potential.
In an effort to grab online market share and not be left behind, companies often take short-cuts when building e-commerce sites—and that extends to building the team as well. It's understandable. First, e-business managers are a new breed of manager who must be able to understand and manage marketing, design, software and business teams, usually one or two of which are new to them. In addition to having to learn new skills, site delivery schedules handed down from senior management are aggressive if not perennially over-optimistic. This puts pressure on e-business managers to put teams in place for expediency, tapping people with good intentions but without deep e-commerce experience. Most often managers pull people from graphic design, programming and management. Many companies have neglected the required roles of customer experience management, interaction design, information architecture and usability.
The kitchen analogy
Let me give an analogy that will clarify why you need specialists with real-world experience in all the required skill areas. Several years ago, my wife and I started a remodeling project. We brought in a carpenter/designer recommended by our real estate agent. Because we were new to home ownership, we didn't understand the different skills involved with home building and remodeling. The real estate agent showed us her carpenter/designer's work, which we liked, so we hired him to draft a design and lay out the scope of work.
When we showed his kitchen design to a true kitchen designer, she suggested changes that radically improved it. The cost of changing the kitchen design at that early stage saved thousands of dollars over changing the design after construction had begun. Hiring experts like the kitchen designer became an important lesson in our remodeling project. We found by employing experts in the distinct fields of architecture, kitchen design, interior design, lighting design, woodworking, cabinetry, marble, etc., we could remodel with a higher level of quality and implement a design that would serve us for many years.
Building a successful e-commerce site is a lot like remodeling a kitchen; there needs to be the right mix of skilled individuals participating in the project. You don't need the experts on-board 100% of the time, just as you don't need a full-time architect or a full-time plumber. For many e-commerce sites, you need experts only for different phases during construction. You incorporate the best practices in site design, which include researching, understanding customers' attitudes and behavior, building in enough time in the process to test designs with customers. And you do all that by bringing in the right team members for each role at the right time.
Keeping the balance
Once you've got your team in place, the next step is to give these experts enough power in balance with the rest of the team. This goes hand in hand with the first point. The key to managing a successful e-commerce site is to build balance between the groups in the team, where no single group has dominance over others and each contributes its expertise.
Too often I have seen companies that have effectively given engineering or marketing veto power over site decisions, only leading to problematic sites and unhappy customers. This is usually the result of a particular company orientation, either toward marketing, technology, or design. It is up to the e-business manager to understand power in the organization, and give each group in the team the power to make the right choice in balance with the other groups.
Quite often, a particular company organization imbalance leads to a particular kind of e-commerce site. Here are some examples of different kinds of organizational imbalances that can lead to site problems:
— Company-centered organization: Prevalent among Fortune 500 companies, a company-centered organization puts the needs and interests of the company over the customer, going so far as to affect the structure and content of the e-commerce site. These organizations fail to think about what customers need or want, and focus instead on how their own companies are organized, how they talk, and how they operate.
You have probably seen e-commerce sites that mirror corporate structures, where product categories are organized by company division, where each division has its own design, and groups give sparse information about products and services. For example, when a company uses jargon known only to those in the business, I consider it a company-centered organization.
Here is a typical example of how this kind of imbalance can lead to an unsatisfied web site visitor. A friend wanted to buy a digital camera. As an amateur, he wanted a camera that was easy to use, one that would help him take clear pictures. But most of the sites bombarded him with terms like CCDs, FireWire, PC card slots and uncompressed TIFF mode. The fact that he didn't know what these terms meant embarrassed him. He was put off and confused. The companies had made the wrong assumption about their customers' knowledge. None of them answered the simple question of which camera was best for amateurs.
This is an example of why company-centered organizations can create major customer headaches. If a company-centered style dominates your e-commerce business, customers pay the price and eventually so can the company in lost business.
— Technology-centered organization: Companies that have a long history of technical achievement overcoming complexity often put veto power in the hands of their IT or software groups. This can lead to e-commerce sites that are functional, perhaps even gee-whiz, cool, but not useful, usable, or compelling. We have all seen these kinds of web sites—the ones overloaded with animation, audio, and streaming banners, the ones that force technical gizmos on customers.
An extreme example was the ill-fated Boo.com. Boo managers suffered from a technology infatuation and overwhelmed the other viewpoints in the organization. As a result, their shopping site had cool, animated personal shoppers that failed to work for many people. Not every customer's machine had the requisite software, and customers had no patience to download the required plug-in just to visit the site. When techno-lust overruled customer interests, the company suffered.
But technology-centered organizations can come in other, less obvious forms as well. One client I worked with created deal-breaking problems for customers by not overcoming system technical limitations. Due to hyper-inflated concerns over software stability and an unwillingness by the company's IT department to put creative power in the hands of merchandisers, a dynamic publishing system was never implemented. System changes of any sort required six-to-nine month lead times. In this case, a single technical problem was considered unsolvable, and further investment in the e-commerce site only perpetuated the flaw and reinforced a reluctance to revamp the site and undo the problem.
To overcome technological hurdles requires a customer-centered approach that prevents customer problems, and solves them when they do occur, instead of causing them. Your technical group cannot dominate your organization, or your customers will suffer.
— Designer-centered organization: When the marketing department is the 800-pound gorilla in an e-commerce organization, it can cause a dysfunction I refer to as the "design-centered organization," where the look and message of the site takes precedence over all else. I have seen this problem caused by an over-reliance on print and TV advertising as a convenient paradigm for e-commerce. That is, a company tries to make the site look more like an advertisement and less like an interactive store.
More often than not, the site has been developed by an outside agency, perhaps the company's print and TV advertising agency. One agency designer was quoted in an industry magazine as saying, "What the client sometimes doesn't understand is the less they talk to us, the better it is. We know what's best." This may make for exciting design, but not necessarily for more e-commerce sales. Designer-centered organizations are fine for art web sites, but not for e-commerce sites whose livelihood depends on a large number of repeat visitors.
It isn't always clear to an organization what needs to change to improve e-business performance. While a client of mine fought for bringing a more customer-centered approach to his e-businesses' development process, he kept facing roadblocks from management. Not until a senior executive from another e-commerce company was brought on board to run my client's e-commerce business did his customer initiatives reach receptive ears. His previous management didn't know what it didn't know. This only reinforces the need for e-commerce management that has the background and a successful track record in e-business.
The new worldview
In company-centered organizations, e-commerce teams give more thought to what they have to sell and less to how customers will try to buy it. In technology-centered e-commerce, decisions are dominated by technical considerations, either by overemphasizing the importance of technology or by limiting the capabilities of the site, causing pain to customers. In designer-centered e-commerce, customers' needs are placed beneath the creative and expressive needs of the design team. Contrast these styles with customer-centered organizations, which emphasize customers and their goals above all.
Company-centered, technology-centered, and designer-centered organizations were understandable in the early days of the web when e-commerce managers were still finding their way. In the old worldview, few people really considered what customers wanted. Now, successful and easy-to-use sites like Nordstrom.com, Amazon.com,LandsEnd.com, and Gap.com are built from the ground up to meet the needs of their customers.
In the new worldview, you need to carefully construct a customer-centered organization. This will be reflected in your e-commerce site, and will help you achieve long-lasting success.
Doug van Duyne is senior director of customer experience products and design at Keynote Systems, provider of web performance measurement and management systems. He is co-author of The Design of Sites. He can be reached at doug.vanduyne@keynote.com.
