Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

This is the second part of the Q&A I have recently done with Craig Sullivan. The 1st part of the Q&A covered topics such as the LOVEFiLM user experience, ratings and reviews and their impact on conversion rates and comparing the user experience on some of the biggest high street retailers.

Paul Rouke:Like ourselves at PRWD, you are a big advocate of multi-variate testing (MVT), A/B testing and in-depth web analytics to measure and improve website performance. If you had 60 seconds to sell in multi-variate testing what would you say?

Good question. Here is the summary of thought:

• Your customers are the real experts about the design of your site, the landing pages, forms, copy, pictures, offers and calls-to-action
• Anyone who has an opinion at your workplace (including you) will be incapable of correctly guessing what works best for customers
• If you develop your website through guessing, you may get optimal results sometime shortly before the heat-death of the universe
• If you have any traffic, just use it for testing

MVT allows you to experiment by slicing up pages/emails/processes to use different versions of ‘stuff’ shown to customers. You might change the size, placement or colour of buttons or different graphics and copy text.

MVT takes your traffic and then shows people these variations to find which works best for your business goal. It’s like taking all your ideas, putting them in a barrel, stirring them around and seeing the best stuff bubble to the top.

There are side benefits too:

• You don’t have to agree a single design so all those annoying ideas that you end up arguing about in meetings? Test them instead!
• Since you don’t agree ‘one design’ those pesky meddling co-workers can still voice their opinion but as part of a controlled test
• You end up doing things that work for customers, not implementing 3 rounds of changes from your signoff chain
• The customer has spoken – now shut up. If someone called Tod from marketing really likes the blue button and the customer converts 10% better on the red button, guess we’ll go with that one then, eh Tod?

If you don’t do MVT, expect to continue spending time in meetings arguing about underlines, dropdowns, colours and copy text that nobody reads anyway. If your life is empty enough to need filling like this, MVT isn’t for you – knock yourself out.

This is the best technique for optimising conversion that I’ve come across, ever. I still blend this with UCD, usability testing and lots of other techniques as optimising broken stuff gets poorer results. A checkout process that sucks can only be optimised to suck a little bit less.
When it comes to experimenting with traffic, MVT saved my life and cancelled time-wasting meetings.

Paul Rouke: I have seen that you are currently reading Avinash Kaushik’s book Web Analytics – An Hour A Day. Avinash is also the Analytics evangelist for Google. How would you rate Google Analytics as a business class web analytics tool?

I think Avinash is one of the most inspirational authors on analytics, optimisation and insight. If you don’t read his stuff, go do it now.

I think Google Analytics has improved immensely and I know people using it quite happily for enterprise class analytics. However, this is because they are good analysts and business people, not just because of the tool.

I’ve seen too many analytics implementations fail abysmally, regardless of product or price. The main reasons are that:

• People haven’t done the business analysis to work out what ‘real’ reporting or KPI stuff is needed
• You don’t employ a part or full-time analyst ‘champion’
• Not enough time and effort is spent on implementation, data validation and training

You can’t just spend cash on a product and expect stuff to magically happen. People often switch around vendors hoping this will help and then make the same mistakes. It’s like buying expensive designer houseplants and forgetting you turned the last lot crispy within a week.

Paul Rouke: Which of the more advanced features of Google Analytics, such as personalised segments, funnels and goals do you personally use in your consultancy roles, and how have these insights helped to inform design decisions and convince key stakeholders of a need to improve?

I look at segments of customer traffic all the time. A particular interest of mine is looking at conversion funnel segments – where they come from and how they perform in A/B or multi-variate tests. I’ve used segmentation to optimise for a specific channel so this is shown only to those visitors. This means that you get better results than one set of creatives for general traffic.

Can you imagine a store where you walked in and it was all laid out with the offers and products you wanted, within easy reach and had a helpful sales person to give you a really good introduction?

Dynamic MVT allows you to shape-shift your page to fit the incoming traffic segment based on test data. Type a different keyword or phrase into google – you get a different landing page, a different experience and the site gets a higher conversion rate.

Paul Rouke: We are recently launched phase 1 of a user-centered designed internal business system, and I’ve presented on the subject of why this approach is vital, with a key business case being the age old adage of ‘time is money‘. Have you experienced internal business systems which would benefit from the likes of user testing and a more user-centric design approach, and have you actually being involved in projects for developing internal software and systems which have adopted a user-centric approach?

Internal business systems should be looked at for usability wins just like customer facing services. Intranets, Wiki systems, bespoke applications and particularly customer service back-ends can all show cost savings from training, faster processing and more effective ‘task conversion’.

Paul Rouke: Online usability within the financial sector can play a huge part in encouraging visitors to complete application processes, take out a loan and compare financial products. I notice you have also worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers. What have your experiences being within the financial sector and how well has user-centered design being embraced? Can you name any companies who are embracing a user-centric approach?

I wasn’t involved in UX work at PWC but I do come across a lot of financial sites that have particularly nasty forms that expect customers to jump through ‘hoops of fire’ to complete them.

I was helping two friends research and buy car insurance recently and was struck by how disjointed the process can be. The aggregators (who give comparisons) are improving a lot but are not perfect.

Many applications have to be finalized through the insurer’s site and these sometimes don’t copy the details or have different ways of asking questions. Some websites have forms that are bleeding *vast* amounts of potential cash, given the high cost of customer acquisition in this sector. A focus on analysis of bailout reasons, error rates on forms and general usability would save multiples of the budget required. A 1% lift in conversion through insight is probably worth decades of usability spend.

I used Morethan the other day, filled out a quote and took a phone call. When I finished talking I tried to complete it and it said ‘ your session has timed out’.

Since it hadn’t yet asked me my email address, how could I sign back in to complete it? I guess their reporting just has me down as some poor chum that wasn’t interested – the reverse is true. I appreciate security concerns over the data but how many of us complete this stuff at one sitting, or never get interrupted? In the RW (Real World), life is not single tasking. If you aren’t monitoring this stuff and fixing it, who’ll do it for you?

Paul Rouke: When developing new applications, software and e-commerce platforms, we combine user-centered design with an agile development methodology. Have you worked on projects that combine these 2 disciplines, and if you have, how did you find it?

Agile development methods aren’t new but they are ‘trendy’ with some companies. All I’ll say is that having stand up meetings does not an Agile process make . UCD and Agile type methodologies go together extremely well because rapid user testing and prototyping allows you to fit with an iterative release strategy (small, nimble releases not large monolithic developments).

This also blends well with optimisation work because you can prioritise stuff that has a large customer impact or bottom line improvement and release this incrementally. If your site loses 7% of form fillers because of a couple of errors, you need to get these fixed and live quickly.

My advice to people that focus on Agile is to think of a Venn diagram where there are ‘Experienced Project Managers’ in one circle and ‘Agile approach’ in another. The intersection of the two is the place to look at but I’d rather have experience and cross train someone with Agile. Exposure to these methods or training courses doesn’t make someone good at the core skills of project management.

Paul Rouke: Who do you rate as you your biggest inspirations in the world of usability and user experience?

Hard to list all of them:

• Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool for inspiring me generally
• Alan Cooper for ‘The Inmates are running the asylum’
• Seth Godin for ‘Permission Marketing’
• Steve Krug for the most usable usability book, ‘Don’t make me think’
• Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson, Hurol Inan and Avinash Kaushik for Web Analytics ‘training’ and being ‘Data Junkies’
• Hurol Inan for ‘Search Analytics’
• Luke Wroblowski and 37 Signals for their work on forms usability.

Paul Rouke: I am a huge advocate of multi-faceted navigation, especially for sites with high levels of content. What have been your experiences of this type of advanced navigation, and which sectors has been most pro-active in giving their visitors the power that comes with this advanced, personalised way of navigating large product and content sets?

My experience might be different to yours but I’ve seen a lot of implementations with electrical goods online. If you are looking for a stainless steel fridge where the door fits on the left hinge, with a certain height, colour and price – faceted filtering is ideal.

How to present large result sets and allow a visitor to flip the data, shrink it, expand it and reset it is one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever had. Faceted filtering software and services are very good (there are even open source projects like SOLR now). However, you need to ensure the interface presented doesn’t undo the nice data handling underneath. A library without an index is just an unusable place and so are faceted filtering systems without a good UI.

As our 1st Q&A with industry professionals I’m delighted to publish this article with Craig Sullivan, ex Product Manager in Digital and Usability at LOVEFiLM.

Craig is a User Experience champion who provides the insight and connection between organisations, people, products and their customers. He has worked on large scale UX, optimisation and product launches, helping grow companies with designs that delight the customers and drive commercial success. He is currently working on a number of page and funnel conversion projects and is always interested helping businesses solve tough problems. You can read more or contact him through his profile on Linkedin.

Paul Rouke: I know you have spent time doing User Experience (UX) work for Lovefilm.com, a site I regularly use and enjoy from a usability perspective. How was user-centered design embraced within LOVEFiLM, and what are some of the big ROI success stories?

Well, LOVEFiLM as a company puts a lot of work into analytics, insight, research and customer focus for operations and product design. They are a rarity in being able to manage a balance between phenomenal growth and keeping the VOC (voice of customer) at the heart of all they do.

UCD is probably too narrow a term to cover all the customer facing techniques they use but it’s at the heart of their product design from conception to launch. The user experience of the service as a whole involves optimising every touch point, online and offline, with customers or potential customers.
LOVEFiLM has recently featured in The Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100, number 2 with the fastest growth.

The big ROI success story is in terms of supporting the growth of the site whilst delivering an excellent and improving user experience. I’ve personally driven hundreds of changes that ranged from just delighting customers all the way through to large percentage lifts in conversion rates.

Paul Rouke: In your experience at LOVEFiLM and with other retailers, how have user reviews and ratings affected conversion rates? Do you have any recommendations for retailers considering implementing this type of customer insights, from the likes of Bazaarvoice and Reevoo?

It’s difficult to pick one review site that has enough of an industry spread to make an impact as an independent. If you’re into your customers though, you need to hear what they are saying and there are sources I’ve used to monitor brand mentions in press, forums, blogs and social networks.

I’ve also grabbed feedback from customer trial groups and panels during product development. Regular independent surveys ensure that LF and their competitors are benchmarked on key service elements. This helps identify exactly which bits of a great service really drives the word of mouth and NPS (Net Promoter Score).

The one aspect of reviews I need to mention though is the sheer volume of ratings and reviews on the LF website – these help people to find films they want to watch. I regularly use IMDB and LOVEFiLM to research films I’m interested in, as well as find stuff that I may not have heard of.

Paul Rouke: I understand you’ve worked at John Lewis as a usability and e-commerce consultant. How much was user-centered design part of their processes, and what were the biggest usability barriers that you had to tackle?

I was involved for several years with the John Lewis Partnership and their sites just improve with age. At the start of their e-commerce curve they were really blazing a trail with usability/user experience, web analytics, browser testing, performance & load testing, conversion optimisation, site monitoring, search analysis, email compatibility etc.

This is stuff that companies use commonly today but few organizations were doing this 8 years ago and JL still do all of these and more. Working there as a freelancer, I could see that they really understand and look after their partners (the employees) and customers – something which really comes out if you work there or shop with them.

The biggest hurdle when promoting usability was to get people to understand how it could not only improve the commercial success of a product but also save development time. Manufacturers have long ago grasped these principles, as they can’t afford to launch a new car, just because people over 5’8 won’t fit. Building websites without customers is expensive because you are launching sub optimal stuff all the time.

We had a usability roadshow that went out and sold the concept and the results to many divisions and departments in JL. Showing people a passionate and simple explanation of the techniques and results had a long lasting impact. I was contacted the other day by someone who worked with me at JL and then made UX a big part of their career –you have no idea how chuffed I was.

Paul Rouke: As you know I used to work at Shop Direct Group, another major player in blue chip retailing. How well do you feel John Lewis compare to other blue chip retailers such as Shop Direct Group, Next and House of Fraser when it comes to usability and customer experience?

Maybe I’m biased but John Lewis, Waitrose and Ocado all have services that are simply brilliant. There is a level at which the sites work and what the physical service is like that gives me a good feeling every time I use them. Whether I’m hunting for something in a department store, having groceries delivered or reading an email – they are all good experiences. There are some physical stores or online retailers who’ve made me feel like I’m inconveniencing them when I’m asking for help – I don’t get this impression with these folks.

There are too many online companies with stuff that doesn’t work at crucial influencing points in the relationship. This could be a nightmare form for an insurance quote, a poor checkout process, emails that won’t display correctly, slow or unsolved customer contact, a site that takes an age to load, search and navigation that doesn’t match ‘your words’ for things or landing pages that aren’t ‘what you came for’. All of these can have enormous commercial impact, depending on your business model.

The good news is that there is an opportunity, particularly with the downturn, to differentiate yourself and make your online spend work smarter. The answer here is to get under the skin of your customers and find priority areas where it works for both of you. A small amount of time fixing an application form or a checkout process gets you more money from the traffic you already have. Right now it’s not about pushing the spending slider to get more out the other end – it’s working to optimise what you’ve got.

Paul Rouke: Internet Retailing has launched their ‘Inspiration Index’, which covers 6 dimensions, 2 of which are ‘customer experience’ and ‘moments of brilliance and delight’. Which online retailers would you include as inspiring you the most?

Well, apart from JL, I would list the following sites as having utility or customer experience that rocks:
www.zoopla.com – A property site for renting, buying, researching and being nosy about what other people paid for theirs. It’s such a clean and usable design, it manages to do everything you want without complexity and very swiftly. I expect this site to win more awards and grow their customer base hugely – good user experience underpins this.

www.amazon.co.uk – I’ve used them for years and I’ve had no incentive to use anyone else for a lot of purchases. I find the stuff, it comes, I hardly ever need to contact anyone, it’s cheap and just works. The design hasn’t changed radically, the reviews are really helpful and the faceted search (narrowing/expanding) is really useful.

www.Directgov.co.uk – I know it’s not a retail site but deserves a mention here for freeing us online junkies up from visiting places in the RW (Real World). I renewed our car tax the other day in about 4 minutes and it was much better than previous experiences (don’t ask me about TV licensing grrr….). Directgov are doing a lot of user experience work involving UCD, testing and analytical insight and this seems to be percolating through in online products.

www.imdb.com – The best place for film info, pictures, quotes and to resolve arguments. Whether you are building a library, expanding your knowledge or looking to rent or buy, I still find more here on this site. The design is sometimes criticised but this isn’t what I want it for.

Paul Rouke: We have been running a poll on our usability blog asking for visitors to name the high street retailers you would least like to see go bust (hypothetically speaking of course!) in the current recession. Having worked with a variety of high street retailers yourself, who would you vote for?!

I’d hate to see anything happen to Waitrose (for loads of things), Aldi (for nice stuff at a good price) and Maplins. I have a magnetic attraction that works at long distance to pull me towards gadget or electronics shops. I found myself stopping outside Maplins the other week and thinking that there wasn’t ANYTHING I really needed in there (blank DVDs? Er, batteries? Hmmm, let me think…)

I racked my brain and then reasoned out that I was thinking that MAYBE just MAYBE they had something I might need, if only I knew it was there. Then, feeling satisfied I’d sussed myself out, spent the next 30 minutes finding things I never knew I needed and looking at everything, just to be absolutely sure.

I did plan on including the full Q&A on this one article, but with another 9 questions remaining I think a 2nd post is in order in the next week or so! The 2nd part will feature questions and answers on some of the following topics:

• multivariate and split testing, the benefits and the business pitch
• some feedback on Avinash Kaushik’s book Web Analytics – An Hour A Dayweb
• segments, funnels and goals in Google Analytics
• financial companies who are adopting a user-centric approach online
• multi-faceted navigation, how not to undo good intelligence with a poor user interface

Hopefully this 1st part has been as interesting to read as it was for me to carry out and I’ll look forward to publishing the 2nd half of the session next week.