I once likened user experience professionals to brick & mortar merchandisers--the people who stick the candy bars next to the registers at the grocery store, or who arrange the just-dying strawberries under the right light, in bright green baskets, with some shortcake and whipped cream stacked alongside.
Enticing the customer to buy. A lofty goal, and one easily achieved if the merchandiser sticks to basic principles.
Basic principles often get lost on the Web. Too many online professionals forget about the true purpose of their work. They speak about "usability" and branding and design guidelines. What they forget is, like the person who puts that candy bar right by the register--their job is primarily to sell. Sell books, sell tickets, sell news--the end goal is the same. Get the click, and get the purchase (or the eyes, or registrants).
When I was at www.StubHub.com, a site that sells sports, concert, and theater tickets, my role was to reduce the site visitor's clickpath into "high-demand" site areas. High demand was based upon:
- Our internal metrics (regions and verticals that performed well for us)
- Seasonality (MLB promotions during the World Series, Tourney promotions after Selection Sunday)
- Industry buzz or happenings. This is defined by anything such as a U2 Vertigo Tour onsale (tickets go on sale on Sunday, and we predict a major spike in interest based on that event and promote accordingly), or opening night for a Broadway show.
As the Editor in Chief, my primary goal was to arrange the content and design in a way to drive the customer where I wanted them to go. And I did this, along with suggesting items the customer might also like (just as that shortcake and whipped cream go with the strawberries). All of my actions were based upon simple rules of offline merchandising.
An online merchandiser has additional challenges with leading the customer where they want to go. It's all well and good for a grocery store to purposely create convulted mazes. Online, if you confuse the user (or lead them in circles), they click the back button and exit your site. And on www.Google.com, they find thousands (if not more) sites that offer your product. An online merchandiser must always reduce, not increase, the number of clicks to the end product.
Ways to accomplish this include:
- Advertise multiple areas of the site (or products) on the homepage
- Include cross-merchandising or cross-selling on every page (related products or articles)
- Organize your content into intuitive sections and include your categories as main navigation
In the next section, we'll discuss prinicples of design, layout, and copywriting that help drive the user where you want them to go.
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