Recognise Customers as Individuals, Part 3

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission. 

The past few weeks I have been looking at the need for organisations to focus more heavily on the user experience and to more rigouroulsy understand what their customers want online and how best to deliver that to them. Good customer insight is core to that process and insight comes from a range of systems, methodologies and techniques. Last time  I looked at the use of quantitative approaches to customer insight and this week I want to look at some of the more qualitative approaches.

For years in “offline” marketing quantitative and qualitative approaches have been used side by side to understand consumers’ preferences and behaviours. It is only relatively recently that in the online channel that businesses are pulling these disparate sources of insight together to get a fuller picture into what is happening in the online channel and why. Part of the problem has been technological – it’s been hard to integrate data – but another part of the problem has been organisational with different functional silos focussed on different aspects of the customer journey or the customer experience. Certainly here in the UK and I’m sure it’s the same in the US and some of the other more sophisticated digital economies that we are beginning to see roles and job titles such as “Director of Customer Experience”. Something we didn’t see a couple of years ago. With functional integration we are beginning to see more data integration as joined up thinking requires joined up data. Part of that integration involves the “blending” of hard quantitative based data with softer qualitative data collected using a variety of predominantly observational techniques.

Website usability testing has been around for ages (in digital marketing terms) and has been a core tool in the website development process for many organisations. But I am still constantly amazed by how many organisations don’t do any usability testing either during or after the product development process and still spend large amounts of time and money on developing sites or functionality without testing to see whether typical users can actually do what they wanted or expected to do. Simple usability testing can tell you a lot about why things don’t work that you would never get from staring a bunch of web analytics reports and given that often the respondent will be talking about their experience at the same time, you not only get to see why things may not be working, you get to hear it from the horse’s mouth as well. Usability testing techniques are evolving all the time and methodologies like eye tracking are becoming standard features of most tests rather than expensive optional extras. Eye tracking shows where the user is looking and combined with other data such as a click map from a web analytics system is really useful for page level optimisation requirements such as merchandising and promotional work.

One of the criticisms about usability testing is that labs can be an artificial environment in which to observe the user experience. As a result we have seen more use of “ethnographic” style research in which customers are observed interacting with websites in their “natural habitat” such as their home or their work place. For one piece of research we conducted for a retailer we went out into the homes of customers to see how they managed to use the website in their own environment. Pictures fed back to the client showed users balancing laptops on their knees on the sofa or standing in the kitchen with the laptop on a worktop. We might think that customers are focused on the site but the reality is that they could be in an environment which is full of noise and distractions and it certainly puts a different perspective on the kind of experience they may be having.

Some of the newer and more innovative qualitative approaches to understanding the user experience include techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) to try and measure emotional engagement. This approach uses brain scanning techniques to monitor subconscious responses in the brain when users are subjected to different stimuli on a website. How do they emotional react, for example, to different types of messaging, images or layouts? It’s like eye-tracking on steroids.

With all these innovative developments though the fundamentals remain the same and that’s the recognition that good user experiences cannot be built in a vacuum and without a deep insight into, and empathy with, the goals, aspirations and expectations of our customers. The data, the tools and the techniques just help us to get there.