K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple for the Shopper
Latest web designs are cutting through the clutter while pulling on the heartstrings.
By Mary Wagner
Since the dawn of Internet retailing, one thing has remained constant: Retailers are always re-designing their sites. That is especially true as the medium has gone mass market.
But while re-design is a constant, there has been little to match the flurry of re-designs of major sites in the past year. Many of the leading web-based retailers—click-and-brick, pure-play dot-coms and catalogers alike—have come out with spiffed up sites. They include EddieBauer.com, Walmart.com, which came back up after a whole month offline last fall; BlueLight.com, JCPenney.com, Staples.com, LandsEnd.com, 800.com and Buy.com, to name just a few.
What these sites have in common is a drive to design the site in such a way that anyone will find it intuitive and easy to use. For success in the mass market, a site must make it easy for consumers to buy. Really, really easy. That’s why usability has emerged as one of the guiding themes in web site design. “We built our site on usability,” says Bill Strauss, CEO of Proflowers.com, a San Diego-based web florist.
But usability isn’t the only buzzword buzzing around new and improved site designs. “Emotion” is another one. Catalogers have long known that creating a mood when presenting products can spark sales. Now, web sites are learning that lesson, too, and it’s not just the flower and gift merchants. New looks in photography, color and more are showing up on web sites as retailers seek to tug on shoppers’ hearts. JCPenney.com’s new design, for instance, recently featured exceptionally beautiful photos of mother and child as well as bride and groom—serving up idealized images that tie purchasing to deep rooted ideas about motherhood and marriage (see box p. 19). “Customers wanted to be emotionally engaged and drawn into the site,” says a J.C. Penney spokeswoman.
Creating usability
Usability rests on three factors, says a recent report from Forrester Research:
— helpful organization and solid search;
— content, tools and service to support purchase decisions; and
— a focus on simplicity.
To deliver on those criteria, sites are streamlining navigation, changing search and shopping tools to match shoppers’ natural thought processes, and smoothing the path to checkout by giving consumers information they need to make buying decisions—like shipping charges—earlier in the process. And it’s all in the name of making web shopping as easy as possible.
Like the high-powered engine that chugs along unseen to make your car run, making online shopping seem simple takes a lot of complex magic behind the scenes. Retail sites are sinking big research and technology dollars into delivering a hassle-free shopping experience for consumers. So on the smoothest-running sites, what shoppers see and experience is just the tip of a very large iceberg. “Keeping it simple is incredibly complicated,” says Colin Hynes, director of usability at Staples.com.
The analysis, logic and programming needed to make the systems do searching, sorting, and other tasks for the shopper requires more hardware and software. “Keeping it simple for customers and making the site mirror the way they think creates a tremendous amount of burden for the company on the back end,” says Proflowers’ Strauss. “It’s definitely a lot more support-intensive than if our system made the customer do more of the work. And it’s more costly this way.”
Yet that’s exactly where Proflowers.com has chosen to plunk its money down. The privately held company, which racked up sales of $8.1 million in the fourth quarter of last year, has spent as much as $20 million on its technology platform since it launched in 1998, Strauss says. That platform supports a shopping process Proflowers built in-house after reviewing and rejecting off-the-shelf shopping cart technology.
Delving into the head
To build its system, Proflowers dug deep into customers’ heads to focus on the thought process involved in ordering flowers, and then designed an ordering process that matched. It switched the fields in its order form, for example, to asking for shopper’s billing information last instead of first. “We know from our research that’s not what people think about first when they’re ordering flowers,” says Richie Hannah, director of web strategy. “What comes to mind is who they’re sending the flowers to.” So early in the ordering process, Proflowers asks for the recipient’s address and the card message. That gets shoppers thinking about the recipient, emotionally involved in the purchase, and invested in completing the transaction. “Once they fill out that page, they’ve already completed half the order process,” Hannah adds.
Putting itself further into the minds of its customers, Proflowers looked at but passed on adding major content, community features, or other products. “People just want to see how the flowers they’re sending will look, and they want to purchase them fast, so we focused on that,” says Chris d’ Eon, vice president of marketing retention.
Toward that end, it hooked up with content distributor Akamai Technologies Inc. to speed page downloads, and it stripped away whatever its research deemed nonessential. What’s left is an easy to navigate site offering about half a dozen ways to search, high resolution product images that load fast, and rapid check-out. A simple navigational tweak dreamed up in-house drives more conversions from one page than any other on the site, says d’Eon: a search feature that lets shoppers view thumbnails of the site’s entire collection by scrolling down on one page rather than requiring them to load new pages to see it all.
The rest of Proflowers’ keep-it-simple strategy is Marketing 101, drawn from the previous catalog industry experience of several executives on the management team. “What really increases conversions is putting the right product in front of the customer,” says d’Eon. “In catalogs, you display your best products right up front, because catalogs are about people shopping and not any of those other things.” To select featured products for the home page, the company monitors conversion rates on products and watches the patterns in which shoppers move to and from products on the site.
Proflowers doesn’t disclose profits, but so far, its keep-it-simple strategy seems to be paying off. Industry analysts like what they see on the site. The company was rated the top web floral site twice last year in Forrester’s Power Rankings, and received top honors in its category from Biz Rate as well. In May, Proflowers.com signed a deal to become the exclusive provider of flowers on Amazon.com, a choice largely based, Strauss says, on the quality of shoppers’ experience with the site.
Focus on a few things
Deleting the extraneous and devoting resources to things like high quality images and fast downloads are examples of the type of usability enhancements that actually drive sales, says Mary Brett Whitfield, an analyst with PricewaterhouseCoopers. But other features now becoming commonplace on retail sites barely justify their place on the page, PricewaterhouseCoopers found in a recent consumer survey. Few customers surveyed said they’d ever used features like wish lists or related online content. “The bottom line was that e-retailers need to focus on a few things—search, detailed product information and detailed product images,” Whitfield says. “Consumers are saying, ‘Make it an easy, streamlined shopping experience for me, with all the information I need. The other features are icing on the cake, but don’t expect them to be the thing that gets me to buy’.”
But streamlined doesn’t mean barebones. While Proflowers offers fewer than 100 SKUs, other retail sites ask shoppers to choose from thousands. For these web merchants, boosting usability means helping shoppers narrow a big field to find the right product—whatever it takes. So keeping it simple for their customers takes sophisticated search tools that offer multiple routes to the products to capture different shopping styles. “The trend is toward more and more search engine functionality to try to accommodate the wide range of consumers and how they like to shop and search,” says Paul Ritter, managing director of e-retail consulting group Strategic Research Advisors.
Outfit selections
Take JCPenney.com, which launched a major redesign of its site this spring. The site beefed up its search engine to go deeper and return “smarter” results. In addition to category and brand, shoppers can now search by special size, which means plus-sized women needn’t plow through petites to find what they want, or vice-versa. Following a trend established by Landsend.com and others, the redesign also added a “buy this outfit” feature that lets shoppers click and buy an outfit solution rather than pick and choose among pieces. “It can be challenging for customers to shop for pants or a skirt and match up the right blouse. We have great resources in the company in people whose entire job is to watch trends,” says the J.C. Penney spokeswoman. “We’ve gathered up that information to use in putting the outfits together for people on the web.”
Features that increase purchasing most are those that simplify online shopping by making it more like shopping in a store and less of a mental leap from the offline world, says Whitfield. “People want to see products up close,” she says. In fact, close-up product images that let shoppers see almost the same detail they would in a store ranked number one in influencing shoppers to buy in Pricewaterhouse’s survey.
The company was a consultant on JCPenney.com’s relaunch, so it’s no surprise that the new site improved high-resolution magnification on apparel product images to let shoppers inspect details like weave and texture. And JCPenney.com isn’t the only one to get onboard that train. Walmart.com took its store completely offline for a month last fall while it switched to a new technology platform and made design improvements that bypassed major bells and whistles that would have been too graphic-intensive. Making the cut, however, was zoom technology that can enlarge product images big enough to fill the screen.
If giving shoppers detailed product information is one of the cornerstones of usability, still other trends in web site design show that e-retailers aren’t stopping at zoom technology to put it out there. Recent site additions at Eddiebuaer.com and Gap.com prove there’s more than one way to skin a cat, or in this case, wriggle into a pair of jeans. Clothes can’t be tried on online, but Gap’s online Pantfinder and Eddie Bauer’s pants fit guide offer the next best thing: side by side comparisons of jeans and khakis that drill down to details of how each style fits. On EddieBauer.com, shoppers can view the bootcut jean, for example, alongside the five-pocket capris, with details on the slimness or fullness of the cut at the hips, knees and ankles posted next to each style. Gap.com’s Pantfinder even lets shoppers rotate the pants to see how they’ll look from the front, side, and rear.
Eddie Bauer’s pants fit guide is one of several new features rolled out in connection with or since a major re-launch last July, says Sally McKenzie, vice president of interactive media. Others include an instant outfit feature—”We’re not all fashion geniuses,” McKenzie says—the ability to view clothing in each color in which it’s offered, and more. All of the new tools and features have one purpose: improved product presentation.
Going up
EddieBauer.com may not be the flashiest site out there, says McKenzie—-a theme that the latest web site redesigns reflect—but Eddie Bauer is after more than just eye candy. “We’ve tried to establish best practices for web sites in terms of giving people a lot more detail about what they’re buying,” she says. With the relaunch and with each new tool, page views, conversions and time spent per page have all risen, McKenzie says. “We can’t tell how much of the increase is attributed to which tool,” she adds. “But the numbers are going in the right direction.”
At Staples.com, usability is more than just a theme guiding site design refinements: it’s the full-time job of Colin Hynes, Staples.com’s director of usability. Hynes’s preparations for a major site relaunch at Staples last year shows why the function rates its own job title. To direct the overhaul of its already award-winning web site, Staples.com did hundreds of hours of usability testing with online shoppers, and also pulled in data from customer e-mails and independent ratings services such as BizRate. One of the goals was to buff up usability by making the site’s navigation system more intuitive.
The research turned up surprises that fed directly into site improvements. Here’s a sample: Moving its former land-based user tests online, Staples.com polled hundreds of users on features like search functions to better understand how users experience the site. For example, an online version of its offline card-sorting test, in which volunteers sort pictures of products into a grid of categories, revealed that some products weren’t located where consumers expected to find them. The test showed users a product image, sometimes with a description, and asked them via a pull-down menu in which category they would logically expect to find the product on the site.
“Typically, you’ll find a lot of people going in one direction or another. You might get 90% saying they think the desk jet printer would be in the printer section, for example, but when you get into other product areas that’s not always the case,” says Hynes. “You may find 40% think it should be in one category, and 45% say it should go in another. If you didn’t know that, you could have up to 55% of your customers looking for something in the wrong place. Obviously, that’s a huge dissastisfier that could cause you to lose sales.”
To solve the problem, Staples started putting the products in question in multiple locations on the site, along with cross references. Cartridges and toner, once listed only in technology, were added to the office supply category, for example, while multifunction machines that once appeared only under printers and now show up in the copier/fax category as well. “The great thing about the web is that it’s not a finite warehouse where we’re limited in where we place products,” Hynes says. “The cost of extra catalog pages adds up, too. But on the web, we can put a product in multiple locations, so the search can be driven by where the user expects to find the product.”
Getting on
In addition to redoing the look and feel of the site, Staples.com also refined its search engine for the relaunch. “We’ve made the shopping a lot more streamlined,” says Hynes. “On the old site, you might type in ‘Palm Pilot,’ and you’d get a page with 10 items. They could be Pilot pens, Palms and other things mixed together. There might even be subsequent pages with as many as 50 results.” Staples.com’s Microsoft site server search technology now chunks results into more product-specific categories.
“It would be great if I got a lot of e-mails every day saying ‘Hey! The usability on your site is the best!’” Hynes says. But that’s not how people react to the best-designed sites, where shopping is so seamless it draws attention to the products, not the process. “Consumers with a goal should be able to accomplish it, leave and get on with the rest of their lives,” he says . “That’s what we want to accomplish. We strive to do that, and we listen to our customers to make sure that happens.” l
mary@verticalwebmedia.com
Going for the heart
 JCPenney.com’s redesign picks up on yet another trend in retail site design. Web merchants aren’t just improving slice, dice and chop functions; they’re tapping into shoppers’ emotions to drive sales. Penney’s heart-tugging home page--with wording worthy of Hallmark—was the result of consumer surveys and feedback about how people like to shop and why they shop where they do. The emotional connection, says a spokeswoman, was a key learning from focus groups and a soft launch that involved feedback from thousands of customers. She adds: “You’ll see that reflected in new photography, color selections and choice of language.” 
|
