As
I mentioned, I had never thought that improving user experience would lead to
more sales. I knew user experience is important. Bad user experience frustrates
the users and would lead to bad publicity of the website which would impact
business indirectly to some extent. But now I know that enhancing user
experience can directly impact the business and bring in more revenue.
I
was working on a website which retails UK train tickets. It is the largest
online train ticket retailing website in UK with good hold of market share and
better understanding of the business. When talking about the enhancements on
this website, selling add ons, offering faster and better delivery services,
etc. were the features which were picked up for development most of the time as
they had potential to get more business.
It
is an open website where people can search and browse train timetable and
tickets. But to buy the tickets on this website users have to mandatorily
register or log in to the website (if already registered). In several analysis
reports, it was noticed that there was a significant drop on the number of
visitors on the website after the log in page. It was quite evident that the
users find this process of registering themselves on the website tedious.
Moreover it was not the one time effort of registration but users have to log
in next time onwards when they come to the website. For this they must remember
their passwords or go through the forgot password flow of resetting password
through email, etc.
Hence,
we introduced the feature of guest checkout, where users can only provide their
email address and proceed with the booking without registration. If they are
already registered and do not remember their password they can still proceed as
a guest by only giving their email address. Login and registration were still
an option to get extra benefits of saved preferences, etc. but was not
mandatory.
This
helped users in 2 ways they do not have to go through the additional step of
registration and if they have once registered they don’t have to remember which
email id did they register with and of course the password remembering pain was
gone. When user is in hurry and wants to quickly make a booking for a train
with a very close departure time, this was an awesome feature. Along with this
there is a human psych of not wanting to provide many details to the online
world where only providing email address can get the work done, and hence this
feature became helpful.
After
a week this feature went live, the drop of website visits after the login page
reduced significantly. The conversion rate of number of people visiting the
website and actually buying the tickets increased by certain %. This was a direct impact of better user
experience on sales and revenue. And hence I learned the value and importance
of enhancing user experience.
We
always focus on complex things to improve business and increase sales but
really never care about such minor stuff, which can create greater impacts. User
experience is one such thing, which can bring in so much value but is ignored
by everyone. For example, an online retailer can offer all the jazzy products
on the website at a lower price compared to the competitors but it is of no
use if the product search of the website is pathetic. Users will not find
those awesome products in the search and will not even know that these products exist at such
low prices. Hence, making the search simple and relevant is the most important feature
on such websites.
User experience is a
low hanging fruit that can create larger business impacts yet can be tackled
easily and quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment