In the fifth episode of Untangled: The Usability Sciences Podcast, hosts Peter Welpton and Adrienne Guillory talk about the ecommerce customer experience and what ecommerce businesses can do to remove unnecessary points of friction in their buyers journey.
Most ecommerce companies, Adrienne argues, have the basics nailed at this point, but there are places where they are making some assumptions that could be causing them to lose sales.
Additionally, they discuss Adrienne’s history in the user research space, the benefit of patience for product managers and product designers looking to have impact inside their organizations, and the dangers of company growth on the usability of a software platform.
Have a topic you’d like to see discussed? Leave a comment below and we’ll consider it for future episodes.
Peter:
Hello and welcome to Untangled, a podcast from Usability Sciences where we aim to help companies and product owners make better products. Hi, my name is Peter and Adrienne, I have a friend who saw one of the clips of this podcast on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago, and they sent me a note and they were very curious about you and your background as a researcher. And it dawned on me after however many episodes of this, we've never really established your story because it really is, it's a great story. In fact, it's a story so good, it's a big part of the reason why I came to work for Usability Sciences. So I thought we'd at least start with you telling that story.
Adrienne:
All right. My story is kind of different. I was not trained on UX research. I didn't go to school for UX research. As a matter of fact when I started, UX research was not the term that we used. It wasn't that name.
Peter:
What was it called?
Adrienne:
At Usability Sciences, it was just called Usability Researcher. That was my title. I went into the big world and found out it was actually called human factors. These are all things I learned along the way. So it was human factors, and then somewhere in the course of my career, probably, I don't know, I think I've been doing this probably five or six years, it became user experience research.
Peter:
I see, okay.
Adrienne:
But how I ended up at Usability Sciences, I was working for a restaurant. I was a restaurant manager. I had a delightful boss who found out I was working on my master's degree. So I would open close the restaurant, whatever it was, and then I would do my master's degree program online. So she found that out and she basically gave me an ultimatum. She's like, "You can either work for me or you can get that degree, but you can't do both." Okay. So I had loved everything about hospitality, so my feelings were more hurt than anything that I was even in that position. So I was like, "I want a job, but I don't know what I want to do yet and I don't want to go back to that. So let me go date jobs for a while." And dating jobs to me is working as a temp. So I went and I signed up at a temp agency over here in Dallas, and they sent me to a bunch of different companies. It was great.
I would go to a company for two, three days, answer the telephones, file, paperwork, whatever it is they needed me to do. One of those companies was Usability Sciences, and they would bring temps in when they had research projects and they didn't have somebody at the front. So I would basically just go and answer the phones and check in participants not knowing what any of this is yet. I did that a couple of times. One of the times that I went in there, I noticed that they didn't have what other companies had. They didn't have a book, and the book was instructions on how to do everything. So they didn't have to go ask, they could just look in the book and Usability Sciences didn't have one. So I was like, "I've just been writing papers up here the whole time. Let me do something helpful." So I wrote them a manual that's like as the temp, this is what you're doing, this is how you check in people, this is how you go stock beer because that was one of my duties, whatever, all the instructions.
Peter:
Did you say stock beer?
Adrienne:
Stock beer was one of my duties. So I wrote all of that in a book and head of HR showed it to the president of the company and he's like, "She did this?" And she's like, "Yeah." He's like, "Why?" She said, "She was bored. Done." So he walks down and he's kind of gruff. You know Jeff. He's kind of gruff, but he was always polite. And then he is like, "You like it here?" "Yes sir, I do." He is like, "Okay." And the next thing I know I was brought on as a receptionist, so I was the temp receptionist. Then I was receptionist, I did that for a couple of weeks literally, and I was noticing that everybody who came into the office looked the same. Everybody sounded the same. I was like, "I'm not a researcher, but I have to believe that there should be some diversity here. So how are you all getting participants?"
So I dug into that and that ended up turning into me becoming a participant recruiter. I did that for a while, finished up my master's degree. Literally, I was recruiting a project while I was in the hospital giving birth. "Are you still going to show up? Make sure you show up. Okay, good. I'm offline now." I did that. And then when I came back, they started talking about maybe I should go into the lab and help support. My very first project I remember was in that December. It was for a contraceptive. And so all of the participants were like young ladies, 18 to 25 talking about how they think about contraception and there's how they talked about it and what was on the screen, and they were nowhere near the same. And 10 minutes into that session, I was like, "Oh, this is my new job. I love everything about this." So I've been doing this now, I don't know, close to 20 years because my son is 15, so almost 20 years I think. Since that time, I've gone on to work at Sabre Technology Company out in Southlake.
Transitioned to AT&T where I was part of the design thinking team and led research there. Did a brief stint at Southwest Airlines on their innovation team, and then came back to Usability Sciences to run design thinking, and then one day woke up as the COO.
Peter:
It's a great story.
Adrienne:
I mean, it's fun. It's fun.
Peter:
Thank you for sharing.
Adrienne:
We just trust the mission, trust the path.
Peter:
There was some really interesting articles that we picked out for this week that I think make for good conversation. And the first one is a website called It's Nice That, and it was a question written or submitted by a designer who was, and I'm paraphrasing here, but basically this person's question is, "Hey, I'm building these designs and I find myself regularly falling into getting overruled or outvoted on design, and is there a way to regain creative control as a designer?" And did you have some thoughts on that or guidance on that?
Adrienne:
Yeah, so it's always interesting. So a lot of people come into this space as either a designer or a researcher, and they want to make impact. They want to hit the ground running day one, and they want to see change. They want to implement change. They want to take apart of the entire website day one. They want to reorg the structure of the company day one. And it's funny to watch it happen because they hit their head a couple of times and then they're like, "Wait, what am I doing wrong? Nobody's listening to me." And here's a couple things. When you go in to any company, whether you're in research, design, product, accounting, whatever the case may be, I tell people, wait, give it 90 days, 90 days just to observe what's happening. When I was at Sabre, I learned one of the managers I worked for there, he said, there's subtext, there's the conversation, and then there's the underlying conversation. Until you learn that organization, you don't always understand that.
So a lot of times, designers, researchers, they want to go head first and they want to change. Not realizing this organization has been here and there are things here that are making that difficult. A couple of things that might make it difficult. They may not have had kind of a design contribution before. They may not have had research at all or worse than that, they've had very bad experiences with design and research. So we need to figure out if you're not seeing the impact that you want, why? What was it like before you got there? What are the relationships like with the other designers and the other researchers?
So it's not so much, "They're not listening to me." There's a reason why and the best thing that I, as a researcher can do for a designer, let me get you as close to that customer or end user as possible. Because if you're coming in with facts and not conjecture and how you feel and this desire to make impact, you're really focusing on that user experience and making it better. That's going to make more noise than you going in with an agenda.
Peter:
Now, this wasn't part of the question, but it dawned on me while I was reading it. Is there a difference if you are a designer running into obstacles, if the obstacle is a stakeholder, and by stakeholder I don't mean another designer, I mean like a marketing person or a product owner that may not be a designer versus a designer running into design conflict with another designer.
Adrienne:
I think it's easier if it's a stakeholder because a stakeholder, it's probably we just haven't gotten to the meeting of the minds. Sometimes when you're having direct conflict with another designer, that may be some sort of an interpersonal miscommunication breakdown. I've seen some horrible design managers, horrible, horrible design managers. I've also seen some horrible design ICs. So it really comes down to what do you want your role to be? Again, some people come in headstrong and they're going to change everything, but the best thing you can do is just kind of sit and watch and learn. See what it is that if your issue is another designer, maybe you all need to offline and have a conversation. Is it that you don't like my skill set? Am I offending you somehow? Do you think I'm making a play for your position? Which is usually the problem that I have with people. They think I'm trying to make a play for their position. So sometimes it's just a conversation, but I think it's easier to kind of regulate, fix a relationship with a stakeholder than it is a direct counterpart.
Peter:
Excellent. Another article, and this one actually came out earlier this year over at uxmag.com, which was an article that caught a lot of traction because it talked about, the title of it was Everyone hates Workday. And this got me thinking because I've never worked in Workday, but my impression is that historically it was a design that people really liked. But as it's grown and changed over time, like many other popular brands that I could list off that I can think of that I've used personally, not necessarily even business applications, the attitude about them changes.
And what I thought was interesting was a follow-up about this concept that maybe people just don't like using software anymore, and it's become so ingrained in our lives that that is really the problem is maybe less about design and software and more about people's just getting tired head and using software. And in fact, it was funny, there was a quote from a guy, I'm going to read it, who runs a small, medium-sized CRM software development company. And his quote I think is interesting. He says, "I can tell you something that most software vendors are thinking, but don't want to say publicly. If you don't like the software, don't blame the software. Blame yourself." And I think he's saying not the company, he's talking about the user.
Adrienne:
On every level, you know I'm going to disagree with that.
Peter:
I suspect this.
Adrienne:
Every level. A couple things.
Peter:
I was afraid you're going to swing at me when I read that as well.
Adrienne:
No, you see, I put my hands together. Okay, so here's the thing. So a lot of the software, one, I don't think people are just tired of software. I think that's dismissive of the issue. When people group everyone and all people and everything, that's not fair. You're dismissing the issue. And when we talk about things like software, when they come into the market, they're super, super easy to use because this is all we could build for you and we needed it to work. But then they get bigger and they start to add customizations and integrations, and then companies come in and say, "Well, you had it here, but I really need it over here and change this label to this so it fits into my workflow." And sometimes it doesn't. So I think there are levels here. There is whatever was created out of box. Then there is the layer where a company said, "That's not going to work for me. Build me something for me," that was not really initially part of whatever that original software intended to do.
So now we have this bastardization of whatever that thing started out to be. But I will say oftentimes some of the issues that we experienced with software are user error, and it's maybe they didn't use the right word, but a quick Google search would've gotten us to the right answer. We just chose not to do that. But I think the bigger issue here is that middle layer, whatever those customizations and those integrations, people aren't testing those things to make sure that they still work for that end user. So I'm not going to put the whole responsibility on that end user. I'm also not going to always put that on the software company. But there is this middle piece where things get very convoluted and that's what we end up with.
Peter:
I think the best example or the one most everybody can identify with are smartphones. When smartphones first came out, they didn't have all the features and functionality that we have now. They're far more complicated today than they were in '07, but I almost feel like people are more frustrated with smartphones today than they were back then because so much has changed in terms of the user experience and all the things you talked about, the integrations and etc, etc.
Adrienne:
Yeah, I mean, it complicates it. So I have an iPhone now. I just changed to an iPhone two years ago. I've Googled more things from my iPhone than I ever did for my Android.
Peter:
Really?
Adrienne:
Oh my goodness. I needed a tutorial on this device. But part of it is this, our goal as UX designers and researchers is to make the complicated simple, but when you start to cut corners on making it simple, then you start to run into more of these issues. But yeah, so if you have software, you have something, how do you know you have a problem? If they're searching for something, if they're using the search box, it means they couldn't find it, period. That's just what that means. If you are one of the top five searches on Google, you have a problem. iPhone, you have a problem. And then if people are constantly messing up or they're missing things in your experience, that should be easy to find. Again, you have a usability issue. Those should be relatively easy to fix, but you have to care to fix them.
Peter:
Another example, and I won't name the company, but it is a television provider, whether streaming or satellite isn't important, but one of the things that their user interface added probably about a year ago was probably an effort to try to keep prices down or raise revenue, which is when you pause the live stream of television, it used to just sit on that freeze-frame. It might go to a screensaver, but now it pops up an ad. Sometime the ads are still, sometime the ads are video and you got to press a button to stop it. And my experience is is that created a whole host of bugs and problems and user experience errors. But it's interesting to me that the thing that made me frustrated as a user was something that the company was implementing as a revenue generator and all the problems that come with that. Maybe that's why people hate software.
Adrienne:
See, no, I worked with a gentleman one time who said, "If you ever want to understand the culture of an organization, look at their website." I'm going to open that up to their digital experiences, their apps, the TV use, the streaming. We can already see what the conflict was there, right? Somebody was like, "That's a perfect opportunity to make money. Do we care if they're going to look at it? No. Do we know that this is going to add value for our end customer? No. But what we're counting on is one, that company's going to pay us for this spot, and then a few hundred people may actually click on it," whatever the case may be. But you could see what that conflict was.
Peter:
I'd be interested to know if ultimately that paid off for them in terms of revenue versus the hassle that it created for customer service, people complaining or because it locked the software up or whatever.
Adrienne:
And then, I mean, if you're like me, I hate commercials, so I'm going to do everything I can. That probably would've turned me off. I probably would've stopped using.
Peter:
You still got paywall money?
Adrienne:
Huh?
Peter:
You still have paywall money to spend?
Adrienne:
Paywall?
Peter:
Paywall, the pay to subscribe?
Adrienne:
Oh, no, no, no.
Peter:
No.
Adrienne:
No.
Peter:
See, I'm all out of Paywall money.
Adrienne:
I don't know. I really hate commercials though.
Peter:
Okay.
Adrienne:
I will say I'll suffer through it. I don't even see the money lead that's in a different account.
Peter:
Speaking of money, this will lead us into the kind of same conversation, but related to something that we can all have experienced, which are e-commerce websites and the usability of e-commerce and how much it's changed over time. Going online and buying something today is a very different experience. And again, kind of like the broadcast thing I was just talking about, some aspects of it has gotten worse, some of it's gotten harder. And I'm wondering from your point of view as a researcher, what are just some basic guidelines about e-commerce journeys that people could follow to make them better?
Adrienne:
You know what I love about this, Peter, is I just realized, I've been doing research longer than that was a thing. A lot of my first research was how do we take these catalogs and turn them into a website? That was a lot of my research. And at that point it was you have to have a shopping cart in the same digital experiences. They were microsites. It was a horrible, horrible thing. But yeah, so today we're past, I think, most people have the basics. You need to have e-commerce. We need to have good pictures. We need to have quality descriptions. You have to have reviews. You need to have clear call-to-action buttons to add it to the cart. You need to have easy access to customer service or help if you need it. You need to have a description of your shipping policy.
These are all things we've learned all the time. Most sites have them today. The issue that I see now is that there's so much content and they're trying to cram so much into these experiences. Tell them the history of the company. Maybe they don't care. They don't care. They just want to know that they can get their shoes for their kid by Christmas. A lot of the things that people are adding is because we have so much content and we can, not because it's adding value to the buyer.
Peter:
Do you think that the kind of common use of Q&A bots or customer service bots have by and large to help those experiences or hurt them, especially because now they've kind of switched from kind of basic use to more of an AI model that in theory is smarter? Do you think that helped, has helped?
Adrienne:
I love AI bots. I love chatbots.
Peter:
You do?
Adrienne:
Especially when I'm shopping at 11 o'clock at night, and I have a question now. I love being-
Peter:
Do you do this a lot?
Adrienne:
Yes.
Peter:
Okay.
Adrienne:
Yes. And from my phone, Peter. But yeah, so I like being able to get access to quick information to me, and maybe because I'm biased, that means they thought through what I might be looking for and what help I might need. So things that companies use to deflect questions and calls to customer service. Actually, I think add a lot of value.
Peter:
You know buying stuff on your phone at 11:00 PM is the new infomercial buying thing, right?
Adrienne:
That's fine. I used to buy CDs when the commercials came on.
Peter:
For Penny?
Adrienne:
I did. I got the CDs and then the... Oh, what else was it?
Peter:
Cassettes?
Adrienne:
Yes.
Peter:
10 cassettes for a dollar?
Adrienne:
Was it tae-bo? Is that what it was? Tae-bo?
Peter:
Oh, okay.
Adrienne:
Yeah, I had that.
Peter:
You worked out [inaudible 00:20:21].
Adrienne:
I have one of those.
Peter:
What are big things in e-commerce sites that create a lot of user friction?
Adrienne:
So I pulled up a screenshot because I knew you were going to ask me that and I didn't want to forget anything. So when we talk about usability and user-friendliness, depending on which model you pull up, there are typically five characteristics that make a good usability of a website. I'm going to go in this order because they're the ones that are most important to me. So it's learnability, efficiency, memorability, error prevention, and satisfaction. Where e-commerce sites tend to mess up today is learnability. Everyone wants to come up with this new, cool, trendy word and they think people are going to get it, but if we haven't taught them what that means or what that means in this context, sometimes they miss it. Where we typically see that as being like navigation. So they put up weird words for navigation or they don't do a sufficient job at understanding how people want to navigate their site.
So they typically mess up navigation using trendy words or whatever. Next is efficiency. I don't typically see this a whole lot anymore. They tend to be much lighter than they used to be. But I guess thinking about, I don't think about it as in number of clicks, I think about, does my flow make sense? So sometimes they're inefficient because the options are out of order. What else would might go into efficiency?
Peter:
Well, I was thinking about a client we did last year that was a gift website, and they had all sorts of... What was an interesting problem for them is they had so many really clever and unique options that it created a bit of a kludge in terms of the buying process.
Adrienne:
It added all this extra cognitive power to the end of the flow. And that's not efficient. Memorability, sometimes people are like, "Oh, they care about our site so much, they're going to learn all the nuances." No, right? A site, you should take into account that they're not there every day. They're not learning every aspect of your website. Next is error prevention. We don't see this as much in the common flow, but things like checkout, you shouldn't let me make a mistake here that might detriment me. And then the last one is overall satisfaction. What satisfaction to me looks like is should this thing even exist? Are you serving a need or did you just make something because you could? And is it adding value to their lives? And I think a lot of things that we can come up with are not adding value to everyone's life.
Peter:
Which is a whole set of testing that you should be doing from the onset.
Adrienne:
It's usually when I blow up a project. Does it work? Maybe. But should it exist? That's a whole other question.
Peter:
And then to take all of that and summarize it, what are the best ways in terms of research in applying all of this thinking into an e-commerce site? How best can research help solve these problems or prevent them from happening in the first place?
Adrienne:
So let's take the example you gave. So the gift giving site. One, they came in with a whole list of assumptions of who their competitors were. And when we asked their actual customers who they thought the competitors were, that list was very different. So we had to kind of figure that out for them. So that was just one-on-one exploratory. Tell me where else you're buying. If you're not using this vendor, where else are you going? So that kind of exploratory research. Then we did a usability study and actually watch them go through the process. And being able to see them kind of think through it and talk through it really help my client understand. Like it makes sense to you because you know what all these words mean and you know what's coming up, but this buyer doesn't know what to expect in your user flow.
They don't know how you group some of these options, features. They don't know how is it going to get to. So if I buy five of these because I want to send them out for Christmas, how am I going to individually personalize them for each of those people? Do I now need to do five transactions or can I do it in one? So being able to watch them go through that gave them the insight that they needed, that this, perfect word, this process at the end gets very, very kludgy, and this is why you're not seeing conversion like you think you should be.
Peter:
You taught me the word kludgy, by the way.
Adrienne:
I love that word. I love that word.
Peter:
Something you said actually reminded me, which is many times we get phone calls from people that want to do a usability test, and then we realize, well, what you need to do first is do some exploratory and talk to your customers first to better understand what it is you want to test about your experience.
Adrienne:
Absolutely. Sometimes they will just tell us everything. And I think when people tell us that they're expecting to find nothing, and then we get ahold of it and they're like, "Oh, wow, this is way worse than we thought." Yeah. Yeah, it is.
Peter:
All right. Very good. You did very well today, Adrienne.
Adrienne:
Well, thank you, Peter. So did you.
Peter:
Thank you very much. And we want to thank you for watching, and if you have any questions or topics you'd like for us to discuss, please drop them below or send us an email. We would love to engage with you. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you again next week or next month on another episode of Untangled.