blog.edeverett.co.uk

Recently I was asked to redesign the order journey where a customer had come to the site to make a specific change to their current service. The requirement was to up-sell the customer some additional services while they were making the change to their existing service. This has obvious potential to irritate the customer when all they want to do is what they came to the site to do.

Initial thinking from marketing people was to do the selling first. So let’s imagine we’re talking to customer:

“Hi”

“Hi, l want to do [task]”

“Sure, but before you begin can we interest you in …”

“Err, no thanks, can’t I just do what want?”

“Oh, umm, all right then, what was it you wanted to do again?”

… etc.

That’s likely a lost sale. If you were talking to someone in real life and, before being interested in what you have to say, they tried to sell you something, you’d probably be less than impressed. So this is probably not the optimal place in the user journey to be selling to the customer.

Let’s try that conversation again:

“Hi”

“Hi, I want to do [task]”

“Sure, this is what you need to tell me so I can do [task] for you.”

“OK, here are the details”

“Success! Now that we’re done, can we interest you in an upgrade?”

“Unlikely, but I’ll have a look…”

… etc.

OK, the chances are that the customer will still not be interested in the up-sell, but at least we’ve been polite and done what they came to for before we start hassling them. Once the task has been completed the customer will be more relaxed and so hopefully more open to new ideas. It seems the polite way to manage to conversation. Design result: place the up-selling after the point in the order journey where the customer has finished their primary task.

Advantages

Modelling user journeys as conversations:

• Abstracts the design of the user journey away from the technology or web design presumptions.
• Strips the communication back to basic elements that we hopefully all have a good grasp of.
• Allows easy comparison of different proposals. Which provides the most natural conversation?
• Allows us to see the ‘personality’ of the design we are proposing – is it pushy, too deferential, polite or just a bit odd?
• Provides a simple ‘humanity test’ to see if we are designing a process that is focused on communicating with people, rather than just selling or appeasing technical solutions.
• And it’s really quick. As in taking a few seconds – so why not do it?

The biggest disadvantage is that the uninitiated look at you a bit oddly when you say “Ok, now let’s pretend the website is talking to us…”