Chocs away

During World War I, Cadburys was pitching to the UK Ministry of Defence to provide the army chocolate ration. The company conducted a survey to find out what soldiers wanted from their chocolate, but the responses were vague. ‘Bigger and better’ was the message, but soldiers didn’t know whether they had enough for a week and were often completing the survey some time after returning from manoeuvres.

So Cadburys packed up its troubles in its old kitbag and followed the soldiers into the Yorkshire Dales on a training exercise. As a scarce luxury, chocolate was treasured. It wasn’t kept with other rations: soldiers secreted it in their pockets. Back then, chocolate was sold in a single slab and soldiers were estimating their daily ration. They often ran out before the next bar arrived, and didn’t know how much they should boil with water to make hot chocolate.

As web video finds its feet we’re seeing a lot of debate about how pre-roll adverts should be implemented. NBC Universal has limited ads to 15 seconds and CNET is experimenting with ads of between 5 and 32 seconds. But there’s been little discussion about the quality of the advertising. Users don’t care how long an advert is – they care about how long it feels. If an advert is stimulating, it can enhance the customer experience. Sony has shown how a great ad can often be more entertaining than the film that follows it.

The survey had found there was a problem with how soldiers consumed their chocolate, but it was only by observing their eating habits first hand that the company could see what was going on and come up with a solution. As a result of the research, Cadburys invented the chocolate chunk: a perfect one day ration. The tinfoil wrapper was also introduced to help keep the chocolate cool. Needless to say, Cadburys won the MOD contract.

Too often businesses fail to combine quantitative research (such as surveys and analytics) with qualitative research (such as lab tests). At the UPA conference, I was astounded that so few businesses were doing that, and yet it’s the best way to deliver a return on usability research.

My UPA presentation guest-starred Foviance client Sky. “We had a huge challenge coming off the back of the dotcom fallout in 2000,” said Tom Symonds, former internet director for Sky. “We had a Sky.com portal that was trying to do a lot of things. We needed to refocus it, mainly on becoming a sales channel. At the time we didn’t really understand much about what our customers wanted to do on the site, or why they were coming there.”

Sky started by running a survey on the site to find out why visitors came to the site and what they were trying to do. Lab-based qualitative feedback was used to find out how people navigate the site and to discover the decision points.

“Through the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, we figured out that we were possibly losing up to £24m in lost sales because there was a high percentage of people coming to the site that wanted to be informed or were ready to buy, but that couldn’t find the right area of the site to find the information they need and transact,” says Symonds. “So they were either going off to competitors or may have been delaying their decision.”

Using the combination of quantitative and qualitative research, Sky redesigned its navigation and transformed its website into its second largest sales channel (after the phone).

Quantitative research rarely tells the full story. By combining it with qualitative research, companies can understand customers better and eliminate the barriers to business.