Using Content for Ecommerce Marketing

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JULY 11, 2013 · BY DALE TRAXLER

 

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There is a lot of buzz about content marketing. Much of it applies to business-to-business marketers that develop sophisticated lead nurturing campaigns. But content marketing is also important for ecommerce businesses. Many are experienced content marketers and don’t realize it.

What Is Content Marketing?

My simple definition of content marketing for ecommerce merchants is, "Compelling content that is relevant to target consumers as they go through their buying process." Beyond just offering content, you also need to constantly evaluate what is being read and what is leading to conversions in your store.

It sounds simple. Write some content and then see if people read it and purchased your products. But it is not so simple. Most merchants that regularly write a blog, publish a newsletter, or post to various social media accounts realize content can be burden.

Why Do Content Marketing?

Content marketing is crucial because that what your prospects are looking for as they make buying decisions. This content might include the following.

• Product descriptions
• Images
• Videos
• Blog posts
• Articles
• Comparison charts
• Technical specifications
• Consumer reviews
• Expert reviews
• Tweets and subsequent conversations
• Posts on Facebook and subsequent conversations
• Newsletters
• Pinterest boards
• Infographics
• FAQs

You get the idea. There are many content sources that consumers use to choose their products.

Where Is Content Distributed?

Next, consider where your customers will find this wide variety of content.

• Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social platforms
• Your online store
• Your competitor’s online stores
• Amazon (a primary shopping research site for many consumers)
• Niche sites like CNET for tech products
• Blog posts
• Publications that review different types of products — online and printed
• Online forums
• Online reviews

Consumers use desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Make sure your content renders well on all devices. You have little control over what content they will read or where they will find it.

Your Goal

Your goal is to create compelling content that you know your prospects will benefit from. Make it available in many different channels so that your buyers will find it when they need it. Be sure the message is consistent across all channels.

Start with creating good, original product content: descriptions and images. Create detailed product descriptions for your product pages. Make a summary version to use on category pages, landing pages, promotional materials, and marketplaces or other channels.

Then, reuse some of that content to announce a new product offering in your social media accounts. Post your images with a link to product details on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Post a key benefit on Twitter and Facebook. Create a video and upload it to your YouTube channel. Then post it in your social media accounts.

Write a blog post about the product. Or, perhaps write the post about how you chose the product. What was your reason for choosing to stock and sell the item? Tell about competitive products that you may have looked at. Link to professional reviews.

Beyond creating your own content, encourage your customers to do it too. You can ask them for reviews and ratings in your online store and in transactional emails. You can encourage feedback in your blog posts and in your store, noting that most observers believe negative comments actually make all other comments more believable. Many consumers are cautious about all positive reviews and prefer to see some negative ones so they can make more informed decisions.

Lead Nurturing

An important aspect of content marketing is the concept of lead nurturing. Consumers typically make buying decisions long before they land in your store through a referral, a search, or a link from your newsletter. Some consumers research a purchase for months. Others do it for minutes. Some may subscribe to your newsletter and watch you from afar for months before you present something they are interested in. Or, they may be interested, but would like to collect more information.

The single best place for lead nurturing for ecommerce merchants is email. If you can segment your lists by recipients' interests, you can create targeted newsletters. This will likely have the highest rate of conversion for most stores.

But, there are other ways as well. Pinterest boards are a good example of targeting specific interest groups. Try hashtags on Twitter and Facebook. Create Google+ Circles around a type of product or interest. Put yourself in the mindset of your customers and prospects, and imagine their buying process and the potential touch points you may have to reach.

Measurement

Measure your results and make adjustments for improvement. Analytics are the key to learning and refining your content. If you create videos and they lead to conversions, consider more of them. If no one is opening your newsletters, try to find out why and change your tactics. Try all types of blog posts and see which ones get read and shared with friends.

Always measure your results. Use Google Analytics and set goals to measure things like newsletters and blog posts. Look at your Facebook analytics and watch “reach” and “talking about." Watch your Twitter account and see what’s being retweeted and favorited.

Commitment

This may be the most challenging task. Finding blog topics is difficult. Write about the things you are passionate about. Do not write about the products themselves. Write about people who use products. Sometimes that content is the most interesting and most likely to resonate with buyers.

The bottom line is to make a plan of the types of content you will create, and then distribute and execute it fully. Pay attention to what works and do more of it. Don’t waste your time with unread content. This will take time to learn. Commit to content marketing for at least six months. Push yourself to create regular posts, articles, descriptions, and so forth. Experiment with new concepts like videos and Pinterest boards.

Remember, even a simple blog and weekly newsletter supported by social media posts can produce significant results.

Product photography and video: Is the end goal desire, information or both?

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By JENNIFER OVERSTREET | Published: JULY 17, 2012

When it comes to merchandising content, there’s an inherent struggle of competing priorities. E-commerce teams want to make the sale, while marketing wants to reinforce the brand. These two objectives can live in harmony, but the best practices for using photography and videopanel at today’s Merch ’12 workshop stressed that retailers need to understand and respect the differences.

Jared Blank, VP, E-commerce, Tommy Hilfiger

Throughout the session, panelists Jo Amie, Global Operations Manager, Nike; Jared Blank, VP, E-commerce, Tommy Hilfiger; and moderator Joe Barrett, Chief Executive Officer, Sandbox Studio got a little passionate about the nuances of merchandising content, from pet peeves of product photography to the organizational challenges many e-commerce teams face.

Barrett described marketing as responsible for offense, or getting the customers on the hook, and e-commerce teams as defense, keeping them from abandoning their purchase. And while inciting desire (looking at you, marketing) can be expensive and subjective, providing information (the e-commerce team’s job) is a little more straightforward. If it bugs you, it bugs your customers. If you can’t see what it is, neither can they.

Above all, Barrett says, product photography and video should be readable, accurate and consistent. Think about it this way, do items made with the same material look the same side-by-side in search results? Does the same model’s skin tone vary with the lighting? These inconsistencies are a distraction, but one that’s easily fixable. (For a product-focused, super-consistent site photography example, check out Helmut Lang.)

At Nike, the magic word is authenticity. The brand has made a decision to not use real models, but rather show products worn by invisible mannequins, viewable from various different angles. Exactly how many angles are displayed is not a random decision. For every product category, Amie measures clicks, conversion and bounce metrics against number of product views to find the sweet spot where additional views don’t pay off.

And about the cost. Quality costs more, but it’s an investment worth making. When done properly, you can provide both inspiration and information. When making the case for a larger photography budget, consider not just the conversion stats, but ROPO, SEO, brand integrity and opportunity cost.

Closing the presentation, Blank recognized that in many organizations, implementing changes can be easier said than done. Getting buy-in can be difficult when responsibilities are shared by several teams. His advice: Pick three easy wins and go for them. While your e-commerce team may not be able to go as far and as fast as they’d like, success is found in lots of little leaps, not one large one. Celebrate your success with your team, and keep working to improve the site.

Using Proto-Personas for Executive Alignment

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by Jeff Gothelf

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When working in-house as a UX practitioner, one of the constant challenges is getting a seat at the leadership table. Without a VP or C-level champion who is specifically focused on UX, the alternative is often a proxy-champion such as the VP of Product, or even a marketing executive. Without a consistentvoice of the customer present in executive discussions, corporate strategy, and product direction, decisions are debated and made based on each executive’s responsibilities and professional perspectives. The marketing executive will push formarketing initiatives important to meeting her goals, while the customer service champion will push for greater support for his department, and so on for each department present in these meetings. The VP of Product should, in many cases, be the customer’s representative at these meetings but, unless they come from a UX background, they’re likely not speaking directly to customer need.

Consideration of the customer and how management decisions affect them should be a constant part of the executive outlook. There are many ways to re-focus the executive team on customers. Periodically exposing them to recordings of usability testing sessions and focus groups, or occasionally having the UX team brief and train them will help execs stay aware of how well customer needs are being met by the company’s current offerings.

Another effective way of getting execs back in tune with the customer is the practice of creating personas. Traditional personas are usually heavily researched to create validated representations of the company’s target audience which are then packaged up and presented in a tidy report to the company’s leadership. They are time-consuming and expensive to create. Especially at smaller organizations or ones that aren’t fully sold on user research, this can mean that personas won’t be developed, or funded sufficiently. For situations such as these, an alternative type of persona can be valuable: the proto-persona.

Proto-personas are a variant of the typical persona, with the important difference that they are not initially the result of user research. Instead, they originate from brainstorming workshops where company participants try to encapsulate the organization’s beliefs (based on their domain expertise and gut feeling) about who is using their product or service and what is motivating them to do so. Proto-personas give an organization a starting point from which to begin evaluating their products and to create some early design hypotheses. They’re also helpful in initiating and reinforcing corporate awareness of the customer’s point of view to ensure it’s included in strategic planning. This is especially true when the creators of these proto-personas are in a position to affect the company’s strategic direction.

Once proto-personas are created and agreed upon, it is imperative that researchers then take them into the field to begin validating their accuracy. As holes are poked into the original persona hypotheses, they are revamped and rewritten. Ideally, all product design activities are then refocused on the current theories of who the users actually are. The initial value in producing proto-personas derives from the exercise of producing them, which restores the focus of an organization back onto the customer.

This article explains how to build and refine proto-personas. This exercise should be run with your executive team so they benefit from the discovery and thought process that goes into personas, and so the outcomes are products of their own efforts and hence are more likely to be valued by executives in future decision-making. The proto-personas will be refined and improved through user research later so they can be used with more confidence by product teams, but their roots in the boardroom also wins the confidence of management.

via Jeff Patton & Luke Barrett who re-created the cartoon from an unknown origin.

Before You Begin: Build a Proposal

The formality of your proposal will depend on your relationship with your executive team, but having a proposal is necessary in all cases. State your objectives, motivations, process, and how much time the proto-persona workshop will take. It’s best to build some support in advance by checking in with executives individually so when the proposal is put up for consideration (a discussion for which you will likely not be present) you have a champion or two in the room.

The proto-persona workshop will take place over the course of two days, so ensure you are asking for enough time on each day and that they are not too far apart; one day a week in two consecutive weeks works best.

Day 1: Proto-Persona Creation

On the first day, bring the team of executives together for a three hour session, beginning with a short introductory presentation. The presentation should convey that the purpose of the proto-persona workshop is to look at the company from the customer’s point of view and to articulate who the customers are and what needs they have that affect the company. Introduce the executive team to the concept of an ad-hoc persona as a representation of the archetypal “people” they believe will be their customers now and in the future. It is also important to stress that these will be ad-hoc personas (aka provisional personas) and not scientifically proven customer archetypes. Nevertheless, the proto-personas will be reference points that the team can use as lenses through which customer-centric perspectives can be seen in ongoing planning and decision-making processes.

Conclude this initial introduction of proto-personas with visual examples of what they will be creating. Here is an example of a finished proto-persona:

The top-left quadrant is for a sketch of the individual, a name, and some basic demographics.

The top-right quadrant is for behaviors and beliefs of the persona.

The bottom-left quadrant is for demographics.

The bottom-right quadrant is for needs and goals.

Give the team 15 minutes to create as many personas as they can, or that they feel are necessary.

Once complete, the executives present their personas to the team by reading each out loud and sticking it up on a wall. The team then provides feedback on which qualities of each persona are realistic or unrealistic, and on-the-spot adjustments are made.

Next, ask the team to determine where each persona is positioned on five different spectrums. The spectrums should consist of defining characteristics of the user base and should be amenable to plotting on a spectrum (i.e., don’t use binary decision points). For example, one spectrum might be a customer-specific characteristic such as years of experience with your product or within your industry. Another good example of a persona spectrum is tech savviness. Find attributes that not only allow the company to differentiate between different personas but that are also relevant to your products and services.

Next, allow the executives to vote for where on each spectrum the current persona being discussed falls. To make this easier, you can provide them with low, medium, and high choices or ask them to select values from 1 to 5. A fun way to get the team to participate in this process is to give them playing cards labeled with the values 1, 3, and 5 for people to hold up to indicate their votes.

If there is immediate consensus, minimal discussion will be required. If, however, there are outliers or a broad distribution of opinion, the team should be encouraged to discuss and debate those issues. As conversations take place and opinions shift, real-time adjustments can be made to the personas posted on the walls and where they fall on each spectrum.

With each discussion of attributes for each persona, a decision is made where they belong on each spectrum. The persona’s name is then written along the spectrum on the whiteboard to indicate the decision. Almost instantly, patterns begin to form. There are clear clusters and clear outliers, and by the end of the three-hour exercise you will have a board filled with personas and persona names mapped to spectrums.

Executives tend to fall back to their traditional points of view based on their responsibilities, so as a moderator it is your job to bring the focus back to the customers. One thing to keep an eye out for is the group’s tendency to present their feedback and insights to the moderator as opposed to their teammates. The team should debate each other, not you, so ensure the conversation is being redirected as needed.

End the exercise by thanking the team and letting them go for the day. At this point you are likely left with a relatively large number of personas. They will include duplicates and similar personas. You must now spend the next few days consolidating the personas into a smaller, more manageable group based on their spectrum distributions. The goal is to end up with 3-5 personas. Any more than that and the focus of the team will start to drift along with the validity of the personas created.

Day 2 – Persona Verification and Design Studio

The second workshop day begins by going over the consolidated set of personas. Send the executive team the consolidated persona deck well in advance of the meeting so they will (hopefully) come in prepared to discuss. Project each persona on the wall and begin a vigorous discussion around its validity not only as a “real” person but also as a customer that you want to support moving forward.

The team should review each persona in detail and make adjustments in real-time to settle on a representation that everyone can agree upon. The team works until they can agree that the final set of personas accurately portray the spectrum of customers they’d like to service.

The second half of the second day’s exercise is a Design Studio. Many articles have been written about how to run these so I won’t go into specifics here, however it’s worth noting that there will likely not be enough time to run a full Design Studio. Some modification will be necessary to accommodate the time constraints of your executive audience.

Design Studio is used here to give the team a chance to create a product offering for the perceived target audience they’ve spent time creating. This can be a landing page, a home page, or a core workflow in a product or service. The goal here is for the team to rally around the proto-personas and take them out for a test drive and to eventually converge on a single version of the item they are designing. This centers the team on the needs of this newly defined audience.

Wrapping Up & Following Up

After dismissing and thanking the team, follow up shortly after with a summary email that recaps their activities and the themes they found. In addition, reiterate that the proto-personas they produced represent their assumptions and beliefs, and that they will be refined over time. The proto-personas will be used to guide recruiting for usability studies, compared against other customer samples, and updated and adjusted as research uncovers characteristics of real customers that conflict with the original assumptions and beliefs.

It can also be helpful to create a printed deck of proto-persona cards for the executives to use to bring these ideas into any executive meeting, especially the ones where representatives of the UX team are not present.

 

Conclusion

The proto-persona exercise serves several goals. Initially, it will introduce the executive team to the concept of personas and thinking from a customer-centric point of view. In addition, it will align the executive team around a target audience and get them to debate and agree upon value propositions that serve the needs and goals of that audience.

As well, this exercise brings design thinking, gamestorming, and traditional UX practices into the executive suite. These types of tactics give UX a stronger foothold at the executive level and increase the likelihood that the customer’s point of view will figure more prominently in strategic decisions.

Marketing To Women: 30 Stats To Know

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by Ekaterina Walter, Mar 28, 2012, 7:48 AM

Women are earning, spending, and influencing spending at a greater rate than ever before -- and they account for $7 trillion in consumer and business spending in the United States, and over the next decade they will control two-thirds of consumer wealth. Women make or influence 85 percent of all purchasing decisions, and purchase over 50 percent of traditional male products, including automobiles, home improvement products and consumer electronics.

But 91% of women say that advertisers don't understand them.

Recognizing the power and influence of women must be a top priority for marketers if they are going to tap into the market's full potential. Here are 30 surprising stats to help marketers get a handle on this misunderstood demographic.

Earning Power
1. The average American woman is expected to earn more than the average American male by 2028
2. Fifty-one percent of U.S. private wealth is controlled by women
3. Women account for over 50% of all stock ownership in the U.S.
4. Women control more than 60% of all personal wealth in the U.S.

Spending Power
1. Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases, including everything from autos to health care
2. Women make 80% of healthcare decisions and 68 percent of new car purchase decisions
3. Seventy-five percent of women identified themselves as the primary shoppers for their households
4. Women influenced $90 billion of consumer electronic purchases in 2007
5. Nearly 50% of women say they want more green choices, with 37% are more likely to pay attention to brands that are committed to environmental causes

Women and Cars
1. Women buy more than half of the new cars in the U.S., and influence up to 80% of all car purchases
2. Women request 65% of the service work done at dealerships
3. Women spend over $200 billion on new cars and mechanical servicing of vehicles each year
4. Forty-five percent of all light trucks and SUVs are purchased by women

Mom Power
1. Moms represent a $2.4 trillion market
2. Fifty-five percent of active (daily) social media moms said they made their purchase because of a recommendation from a personal review blog
3. 18.3 million Internet users who are moms read blogs at least once a month
4. In 2014, 63% (nearly 21 million) of all online moms will read blogs
5. Moms mention brands an average of 73 times per week compared with just 57 times per week among males
6. Seventy-seven percent of mom bloggers will only write about products or brands whose reputations they approve of, and another 14% will write about brands or products they boycott
7. Ninety percent of moms are online vs. just 76% of women in general
8. Sixty-four percent of moms ask other mothers for advice before they purchase a new product and 63% of all mothers surveyed consider other moms the most credible experts when they have questions

Women Online
1. As early as 2000, women were found to have surpassed men in Internet usage
2. Seventy-eight percent of women in the U.S. use the Internet for product information before making a purchase
3. Thirty-three percent research products and services online before buying offline
4. Women account for 58% of all total online spending
5. Twenty-two percent shop online at least once a day
6. Ninety-two percent pass along information about deals or finds to others
7. The average number of contacts in their e-mail or mobile lists is 171
8. Seventy-six percent want to be part of a special or select panel
9. Fifty-eight percent would toss a TV if they had to get rid of one digital device (only 11% would ditch their laptops)

The sources for the statistics cited in this article are as follows: She-Economy, Ms Smith Marketing, StartUpNation, Clickz, Inc.com, Girl Power Marketing, Catalyst, Forbes.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/170413/marketing-to-women-30-stats-to-know.html#ixzz1qtuiLJY2

Using Salience to Guide User Decision-Making

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by Colleen Roller

Most websites are designed with the intent, or the assumption, that people who visit those sites will do something, that they will take some sort of action. Indeed, website goals are rarely achieved unless users of the site do take action. Nonprofit organizations, for example, often depend on website visitors taking the action of donating.

But what is it that influences or determines whether people will take action? To answer this question, let’s compare two websites to see how they approach the challenge of getting people to donate, and whether one approach seems better than the other, and why.

Example 1: www.justgive.org	Example 2: www.goodwill.org

Which of these two examples makes you feel more inclined to engage with the content? If you’re like me, the second example feels much more compelling.

Motivating People to Donate

The first example tries to persuade users through the use of words. But will users actually read all that text? Probably not. Density of text usually acts as a barrier to user engagement. Reading, after all, is work, and humans are remarkably averse to the effort it requires.

In contrast, the second example contains almost no words. It invites interaction by providing a means to answering a question on most potential donators’ minds: How will my donation be used? Or what is the impact of my donation?

For each category, users can select the type of item they wish to donate. For example, if I click on the “Electronics” category, I get a list of items included in that category. And as I add items from that list, they are displayed in the “Your Items” section:



I can see from the “Your Impact” section that the donation of a TV results in 41 minutes of job search support for someone like Doyle McGee. This information is critical because it creates meaning. It answers the question: How is my donation of a TV actually used? Or how will my donation actually help someone else? I also get a picture of Doyle, and I can read his story by clicking the “Read More” link, which takes me to a page where I can post a comment. On Doyle’s page there were already 17 comments posted, indicating that this approach has been effective in engaging users.

The designers of this widget did several things that are key to increasing users’ willingness to donate. First, the widget immediately invites interaction. Users can explore the options available in the drop-down while getting immediate information about what impact each donation can make. The opportunity to peruse the options within each category may also suggest to users items they could donate that otherwise may not be top of mind.

Second, the widget makes the donation personal by supplying the name, picture, and story (written in the first person) of Doyle McGee. Doyle is a real person who we can personally relate to on an emotional level. Research shows that stories are extremely influential, as they are the means by which people communicate and relate to one another.

In short, the widget is successful because it makes donating salient. Users can readily determine what they can donate, who it will help and, specifically, how it will help. This is the type of information that helps users glean meaning. It may also motivate them to donate more.

Designing for Salience

From a design perspective, salience is important because it drives what users pay attention to. In turn, what users pay attention to drives their decisions, and their decisions drive their actions. This is important because ultimately user actions drive the bottom line.

We affect user actions, then, by designing for decision-making. A key aspect of designing for decision-making is to use salience to influence what users pay attention to. When considering the effectiveness of a web page, it’s useful to ask two questions:

• What is most salient on the page? What stands out and commands attention?
• What should be salient on the page?

Websites are typically used as tools to get users to do something. Getting people to donate to a worthy cause is challenging, as are many other initiatives, such as getting people to save for retirement.

Motivating people to save for retirement

Getting people to save for retirement is a tough nut to crack, and the problem has been approached from a few different angles, some of them more effective than others. A traditional approach has been to simply show people the numbers:



This approach assumes that numbers like these are meaningful to people, but are they really? Are people able to somehow determine what the right number is? Research shows that people are largely unable to meaningfully understand large numbers like these. People have no innate feeling for the difference, for example, between 350,000 and 365,000. Numbers like these become meaningful only when people can equate them to actual quality of life in retirement.

To that end, another approach has been to show people what kind of home they will be living in based on the amount of savings they are expected to have at retirement age. Studies have shown that this approach is much more effective than merely showing people the numbers. This is because the images provide a means of translating the numbers into something concrete that reflects quality of life in retirement:


A similar approach is to encourage people to envision the type of retirement they want. The goal is to direct people’s imagination to future uses for money, thereby enticing them to reduce spending so they will save more:



These approaches have been more successful than simply showing people lists of numbers. A more recent approach, however, works by using a somewhat different approach. Instead of asking people to envision their future retirement, they are asked to empathize with their future selves.

Researchers have experimented with enabling people to interact with age-progressed images of themselves as they make decisions about how much to allocate for retirement savings. Findings from this research show that ordinarily, people are not able to realistically identify with the person they will become decades into the future. Indeed, for most people, thinking about their future selves is like thinking about future generations; they know there will be future generations and that what they do now will impact them positively or negatively, but they are not "me."

Brain scans show that when people think about their future selves, the brain region that becomes active is the same as when they think about strangers! This disconnect between the present and future self correlates with their reluctance to save for retirement. For those who can’t identify with their future selves, saving is like a choice between spending money today or giving it to a stranger many years from now.

Because of the myriad things that could happen in life, it is difficult for people to imagine themselves decades into the future. At best, the image invoked in people’s minds is uncertain and vague. But in research studies, when people were shown age-progressed images of themselves, they were better able to identify with their future selves because it was definite and specific. The future self, then, became salient, which in turn motivated them to allocate more savings for retirement.

Lessons for Design

Through the examples in this article, we’ve seen how salience affects what people pay attention to, as well as their ability to glean meaning from information. On a website, what people give their attention to drives their decisions, their decisions drive their actions, and their actions drive the bottom line. If we want to affect user actions, we need to design for the decision-making that precedes those actions.

Designing for effective decision-making requires that you first clearly identify what you want users to do. Knowing what you want them to do frames the next step: determining what you need them to focus on (or not focus on) so they are able to derive meaning from the information you’re providing.
People can’t make effective decisions unless they are able to meaningfully understand their options. This is why it’s essential to design for meaning. From the examples above, we’ve seen that it’s difficult for people to derive meaning from numbers alone. People need to be able to translate those numbers into something that concretely represents the value of those numbers. The designer’s job is to help people see the meaning of the data—to make it visually and/or emotionally tangible.
Also, because people are largely averse to the effort of work, they typically take the path of least resistance, focusing their attention on whatever is most salient in the design even if it’s not necessarily the thing they should be focusing on. It’s important to understand that users generally consume the design (or information) exactly as it is presented to them.

This is both a blessing and a curse. The good news is that the design itself has considerable power to influence user perception, decision outcomes, and user actions. The challenge, however, is to ensure that the design creates a path of least resistance that leads users to the right decision outcomes.
This is why it’s so important for designers to thoughtfully and proactively think about what users should focus on, and then on how to make that most salient in the design. The designer’s job is to create the path of least resistance that enables people to extract the right meaning so they can make effective decisions that lead to appropriate actions on the site.

Decision Architecture

Historically, the UX design toolbox has not included a focus on the importance of designing for decision-making. This needs to change. User decision-making plays a critical role in the achievement of website objectives.

It’s important to understand that there is no such thing as a neutral design. Every design has an effect on user decision-making, regardless of whether designers have proactively designed for effective decision-making. It’s no different from designing for usability. Every website is more or less usable, regardless of whether it was designed for good usability.

Architecting for decision-making results in a win/win/win outcome for designers, for businesses, and for users. This is why decision architecture—architecting for an optimal user decision-making experience—deserves a prominent place in the UX toolkit.

Cognition & The Intrinsic User Experience

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by Jordan Julien

Over the past few years there's been a lot of discussion around whether an experience can be designed. But it seems like everyone's just getting hung up on semantics; an experience can be designed, but the user will always have the opportunity to experience it in a unique way. The reason every experience has the potential to be unique to the user is, in part, because cognition is unique to each user.

Cognition is about knowledge and understanding, so there's a ton of psychological principles that fall under the umbrella of cognition. I'll focus on two principles that, once understood, will elevate a UX practitioner’s designs to a whole new level.



Even when experiencing the same stimulus at the same time, many users will have completely unique experiences. That doesn’t mean an experience can’t be architected that utilizes knowledge about cognition to increase goal conversion. We create experiences to elicit a response from users; those users’ responses are either extrinsic (e.g., subscribing to a newsletter) or intrinsic (e.g., developing brand loyalty).

Some of the most important decisions UX designers make are those they don’t even think about. It’s generally understood that creating an intuitive interface is important, but few people are really good at articulating what makes an interface intuitive. This is where the concepts cognitive load and cognitive barriers play a huge role.

When dealing with web and software development, principles associated with cognition can be distilled into six distinct categories: three related to cognitive barriers, and three related to cognitive load.

Cognitive Barriers

A cognitive barrier is something that prevents a user from performing the action required to complete his goal. Most cognitive barriers are temporary in the sense that they can be overcome just through information processing. For example: John begins to fill out a credit card application online and is met with a series of open form fields asking for his name, address, phone number, etc. He’s able to quickly move from field to field using the Tab key on his keyboard. The last question on the form asks him to select his interests and provides him with an array of checkboxes. The momentary pause required to process that he needs to shift from keyboard input to mouse input is a cognitive barrier, but only requires that he understand what to do in order to resolve the barrier. That said, this still represents a potential abandonment point if John isn’t able to figure out what to do.

Barrier #1: Number of steps

Everyone has known about this barrier since the beginning of the Internet, and long before then. Why take three clicks when we can get it done in two?

Despite being the most well known barrier, it’s probably also the most misinterpreted because many people don’t understand that all three major cognitive barriers to have to be balanced. User testing and ongoing multivariate testing are two very good options for striking the right balance between number, length, and difficulty of steps in a user journey.

The takeaway: Understand that it’s equally important to know when to add steps as it is when to remove them. Five easy, short steps often impose a lower cognitive barrier than one long, difficult step.

Barrier #2: Length of steps

Just like barrier #1, the length of each step needs to be appropriate for a given experience. We can’t adopt a blanket rule that shorter steps make better experiences. In some cases, a longer step upfront could provide a substantially better experience as a whole.

There are two major considerations when examining length-of-step barriers: users expectations, and cognitive load. A user might expect to spend ten minutes applying for a credit card online, but might only expect to spend one minute finding show times for a movie. Additionally, users will only interact with systems they understand. Understanding the principles of decision-making, cognitive recognition, and cognitive recall will ensure users are not overwhelmed, while providing affordances for a complete experience.

The takeaway: Design pragmatic step lengths based on how motivated the user is to achieve his goal. Users will spend longer with sites, tools, apps, and products they enjoy than they will with ones they’re simply required to interact with. Users tend to prefer short steps that only ask them to resolve the immediate issue they’re faced with. For example, when a user lands on the Wikipedia page for the first time, he’s faced with the issue of selecting a language. It’s better to get him to select his language as one step and then get him to enter his search term as a second step rather than requiring him to fill out a series of questions that could be used to personalize his experience.

Barrier #3: Difficulty of steps

The difficulty of a given step is subjective, and is a main concern of UX professionals. Generally, it’s better to have easy steps; however, there are a couple of downsides to making things easy. Users tend to develop a greater sense of loyalty toward experiences that they’ve invested time in. Conversely, users tend to be fickle about experiences they’ve not invested much time in.

It’s important to understand that users tend to make quick decisions based on previously experienced conventions. This means that when steps of a process are considered important (e.g., selecting a payee, making a purchase, entering a contest) they need to make use of special design patterns that cause users to slow down. This type of slowdown often involves making steps more difficult to process, but result in less user error.

The takeaway: Don’t create unnecessarily difficult steps, but don’t immediately discount adding difficulty to limit conversion and increase the quality of the converted. Remember, users will be more likely to complete difficult steps if they understand why the step needs to be so difficult.

Cognitive Load

Cognitive load is the amount of working memory required to achieve the user’s goal. This principle forms the basis for Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think. The less a user has to think about what he needs to do to achieve his goal, the more likely he’ll be to achieve it.

Attribute #1: Number of choices

Choice/decision architecture is becoming one of the biggest and most important specialties within the UX field. Understanding natural decision pivot points and how to manipulate the saliency of decision-making elements is key to ensuring users are quickly able to make the right choice.
For example, the most effective e-commerce sites focus on getting users to the product they’re looking for as quickly as possible before hitting them with related products/up-sells. These sites make great use of natural decision pivot points. Once a user has found what he’s looking for, there will be a natural point at which he’ll be receptive to additional offers. If there are related products, up-sells, or related promotions, capitalizing on these pivot points is important.

The takeaway: Human working memory is limited. Users are more likely to move around a site with a simple structure than one with a very wide or very deep structure. George A. Miller published a paper in 1956 called The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information is the quintessential guide to avoiding choice paralysis. It essentially stipulates that the majority of people have the capacity to remember 5–9 things. So if you’re creating a taxonomy, it would be ideal if it were somewhere in that Goldilocks zone. That said, a more recent study suggests that working memory limits are likely lower, possibly as low as four things.

Attribute #2: Amount of thought

The most important part of understanding cognitive load is understanding how much a person needs to think about a decision prior to making it. Thought processing is somewhat of an abstract concept because is varies substantially from person to person and doesn’t directly relate to real-world time. This means that it’s possible to create a longer experience that has a lower cognitive load, and conversely, to create a shorter experience that has a higher cognitive load.

Each experience has to be evaluated individually to determine whether people would:

1. understand that they need to take the time to make the desired decision, and
2. are willing to spend the time required to make the decision.

These are two distinct considerations. Many people are used to making hasty decisions online because they rely on their own experience to interpret design patterns. If they are asked to take the time to make the optimal decision, even if it only requires one second longer than it would to make a satisfactory decision, users will need special design patterns to recognize they’re being asked to do this.

Take the current incarnation of fox.com, for example. The primary navigation has little downward-facing arrows next to each element. Here’s a great example of a design pattern intended to slow users down and make an optimal decision. These arrows indicate that users should not simply select a section, but should expect to see a mega-dropdown with sub-categories.



Although this is a valuable design pattern, Fox has failed to use the appropriate interaction design pattern. They’ve decided to expand the mega-nav on click, which is fine, but rather than closing the mega-nav if the user clicks again (i.e., making each navigation element a toggle), Fox takes the user to that category landing page if the user clicks again.

The takeaway: Users rely on their own experience interacting with digital, and non-digital, products. Therefore, users will make decisions they understand first, and will only stop to consider their decision if they don’t understand what to do. If you use standard conventions, you’ll ensure users don’t have to think too hard to use your site, app, or product.

Don’t ask users to select between too many options. Again, the 7±2 rule is a great guideline to adhere to. Don’t have more than 5–9 calls-to-action, categories, or menu items displayed at any given time. This can be achieved by hiding additional options off-screen, or though a well-thought-out taxonomy. Hiding elements should be done using standard conventions, e.g., standard vertical scrolling, “Advanced” buttons, split buttons, collapsible areas, ”Show more” buttons, etc. Avoid hiding list items that need to be evaluated together.

Attribute #3: Confusion and choice

How would you log into an investment account with your online bank if your bank has two options: “Online Banking” and “Credit Cards”? Most people would use process of elimination to select “Online Banking,” but some users may abandon their goal if the don’t understand the choice. It’s kind of like asking people if they want a fork or a knife to eat their soup.

Many UX professionals get caught in this pitfall by not allowing users to evaluate a complete set of options at a glance. Remember the 7±2 rule? Well, this is where it starts to get slippery. If you’re unable to reduce the breadth of a site to 5–9 top-level categories, it’s better to display all of them than to display a subset of them.

For example: John is looking for a set of work gloves and visits the Canadian Tire website. There are eight top-level categories that appear in the primary navigation. John begins to look for which category he thinks might contain work gloves. He doesn’t see a category that makes sense but knows that Canadian Tire sells them. The issue is that the canadiantire.ca only displays a subset of the total number of departments within its primary nav.

Along the left rail, there’s local navigation that includes all of the departments, one of which is apparel. Apparel does not appear in the primary nav. It’s okay to show a subset or summary of options upfront if it’s clear that it’s only a subset, and if there’s an option to show all options.
There should never, or rarely ever, be a need to hide a selection of navigational options. It’s fine to hide the navigation as long as there’s a clear way to access it again; but it’s important to show all of the options when the navigation control is displayed.

The takeaway: Users often mistake a selection of options for the complete set of options. It’s easier for a user to understand which option to select when he can see the alternatives. If only five options of a 20-option set are visible at a time, it will be more difficult for the user to decide which option to select.

Conclusion

UX has a lot to do with how users find and consume content. Understanding the cognitive processes and nuances people go through when finding and consuming content is important to architecting an ideal experience or, at least, to architecting a set of conventions that support a user having an ideal experience.