The Internet Customer Experience is King
November 3, 2003

We've all been there, searching the Internet counterpart of a favorite brick and mortar store, hoping to find a satisfactory shopping experience without the parking hassles. We surf in search of that perfect white shirt, a specific model of cordless drill, that exclusive handbag on sale, only to give up and scream, "Why can't I just find what I want?"

How can online shopping become such a frustrating goose chase when millions of dollars are committed to marketing plans and concepts, advertising campaigns and website design? What is it about the e-commerce experience that frustrates consumers so completely they will abandon a purchase and possibly even their brand loyalty along the way?

While website design may appear to be all about creating individual impressions or pages that reflect the brand, the crucial, but often overlooked element of usability -- that satisfying feeling of getting where you want, when you want, how you want -- can make all the difference in how a brand is perceived to the coveted Internet shopper. Too often, corporate marketers give lip service to usability -- they assume people are inherently fascinated by their company.

Usability is not about being pretty or cool or slick; usability is ultimately about sales. Usability has economic value. In the Spring of 2003, Genex and market researcher Synovate asked a cross-section of 1,100 Internet users, "when making decisions about products you will purchase, how important is an easy-to-use, well-designed website to you?" The survey revealed that 65 percent felt that the quality of the web design in the potential vendor's site was more important than the quality and price of the product offered. Perhaps most telling, only 4 percent of those surveyed would be willing to muddle through a difficult website to find a great price. And poor design (that is, limited usability) can have a significant spillover effect: nearly 30 percent of consumers reported that a poor website would affect their desire to purchase from that vendor offline.

Designing for usability means reaching into a fourth dimension -- in this case, the customer experience - where the watchwords are usability, relevance, depth. For every site that misses, a case can be made that designers took their eyes off the customer experience.

Bearing a greater likeness to architectural or industrial design than graphic design, creating a site for usability requires a holistic understanding of the user experience. Like thinking through a chess strategy, the best website designers plan several moves ahead, creating each operational feature with an eye on where the user might go next and how best to integrate messages in that context.

This concept has caused no small amount of friction in the web design community. The very notion supplants the traditional advertising agency vs. design firm vs. web firm, demanding all factions work under one integrated, overriding concept, carried out through all mediums to one end: drawing in and keeping the customer engaged, and invested in the brand.

Designing for usability begins by acknowledging that the game has changed irrevocably. Where consumers once followed a chronological scenario model - moving through the brand experience in predictable ways to make a purchase - the old "media funnel" is gone.

Intelligent site usability recognizes this shift. Designing for usability means continuously hooking consumers back into the web, and then spinning them around a central axis to other areas of the business -- a critical way of reinforcing the brand and offering alternatives, in the event that the consumer doesn't make a purchase at his or her first stop. This revolutionary model is a departure from the traditional model of brand interaction, for consumers and marketers alike.

Neophyte designers, with their own visions of creative concepts and branding, often overlook the notion of design as a communication process, not purely a visual or aesthetic impression. As a result, the brand pays the price for this shortsighted approach, with customers muddling through, then bailing out of poorly designed sites that lack flow and usability, and provide little or no direction. For a site to be successful, it must be both useful to its audience and usable. If just one of those criteria exists, you're only half way there.

Admittedly, designing for overall brand experience, making certain that a site dovetails with the retail and print environments, and that all elements work to guide customers -- holistic brand integration, if you will -- requires a view from 30,000 feet and management willing to direct all these elements as a whole. That's a tall order, even for a well-integrated organization, but the risk in not taking that view is rising rapidly. Cross-media advertising, for example, should be standard operating procedure.

The bottom line: Creating a positive, meaningful customer experience for Internet shoppers could mean saving the brand. In a connected age, site usability is now a fundamental component of marketing strategy. Customers who bail out of confusing sites "walk away" without making a purchase, and probably with a negative impression of the brand. And they might just go somewhere else - online and off.

Founded in 1995, Genex (www.genex.com) delivers web design and development services to Fortune 1000 companies seeking high-value, low-risk strategy, creative, and engineering.

Return to this week's issue of VOX >