This presentation was delivered by Gerard Loosschilder, Chief

Innovation Officer and Willem Buijs, Interaction Designer, at

the Insight Innovation Exchange conference in the Georgia

Tech conference center in Atlanta (GA, USA) on 18 June

2014.

The presentation taps into insights extracted from SKIM’s E-

Tailor program, which combines insights from choice modeling

and interaction design to help drive the conversion and

satisfaction rates of online retail.

1

Interaction design addresses how a product or service is

presented to users and how that presentation makes people

feel and act. It is about improving the end-users interactions

with the service, shifting from being product-centered to being

user-centered. In online retail, interaction design focuses on

what shoppers experience and how they feel supported to find

what they really want.

Interaction designers focus first on the user’s desired

experiences, serving as the starting point for the design

process to provide a better user experience overall. From

there, the challenge is to take the desired experiences and

translate them into effective environmental design parameters.

2

To explain how we may go about, we present the story of

Daniel, the owner of a downtown computer hardware store.

Over the years, Daniel has been very successful at selling

computers; desktops, laptops and more recently, tablets.

The secret to his success was a deep understanding of the

customer and her needs, and his ability to adapt the sales

conversation to the needs and profile of the customer.

3

When a customer enters his store, Daniel quickly categorizes

the type against a set of personas in his head, and he quickly

confirms the type by asking a few questions. Based on this,

Daniel decides a sales strategy, taking the customer to a part

of the store where he pegs that the customer would find the

product of his or her choice.

4

Daniel has laid out his store in a way that it is fully supportive

of his sales strategies and tactics. Instead of cramming his

store full of computers, Daniel has a selection to capture the

variety of personas and needs that he expected to get in his

store. Once Daniel has pegged the customer as one of a

certain kind, he takes them to the corresponding section of the

store and helps the customer make a choice among the

options laid out.

His focus is to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty,

ensuring that customers feel good about their choices and

increasing the likelihood that they come back for future

purchases.

5

Daniel fine-tuned his sales skill over time. This way of working

has worked out really well for him. Daniel’s business has

grown over the years, he makes good money and he has built

a loyal customer base.

6

However recently, the tide has turned. For the first time in

years, sales are down. His customer base seems not any less

loyal in that they keep frequenting his store, but it happens

more and more often that they leave the store without a

purchase.

Upon enquiring, Daniel found out that they would collect his

advice but close the purchase online, at a price that he would

never be able to beat.

7

Daniel found out that his experience was in line with the

industry trend of sales shifting from offline to online stores.

Daniel’s suspicions were confirmed by his research. Daniel

read in an industry report by the US Census Bureau and

referred to by Jeff Jordan’s blog that the direct web sales of

computers went from 3% to 18% over the last 10 years.

If we assume that people have not suddenly started to buy

more computers, it was sales lost for stores like Daniel’s.

8

The writing was on the wall and it was time to act. Indeed,

Daniel found out that others were selling products at prices he

was not able to beat, and these stores also offered the

opportunity of conveniently delivering the product to the

customer’s home.

Daniel started to look into the opportunity of opening his own

online retail channel. However, he did not like the designs of

competitor stores. To do it better, he started working with an

interaction designer.

9

Based on his experience in his actual store, he knew that

effective sales are all about effectively gauging the client’s

profile, needs and preferences. He considered it would be

perfect if he could translate his knowledge of the sales

process in a traditional store to his new web store and give

shoppers a better experience than they were able to find in the

online stores that he saw today.

10

11

So instead of just dumping zillions of products online and

installing a few filters to help customers weed through them …

… he attempted to deliver the same kind of experience that

customers experienced visiting his downtown store; the focus

on understanding who they are, their needs and preferences,

and come up with tailored advice that would make his

customers happy.

12

This is when interaction design comes in handy. We want to

understand how we can give customers the same type of

support and advice, and the same type of desired experience

as they would have in a physical shop, and translate this into a

web environment. Daniel started working with an Interaction

Designer to get the desired experience.

13

Designing the desired experience can be described best by

drawing an analogy between online and offline retail. Online

retail stores selling computer equipment look most like a Best

Buy; an electronics retail chain in the United States. This chain

offers a choice from many brands and options within the

brand. Sales assistance is focused on helping customers

making a selection from the massive amount of products on

display. It is not particularly hard to translate this environment

into an online web store.

Customers flock in by the masses and browse to process as

many products as possible, reading the specs and go

purchasing their desired product. The online store would look

like most web stores these days: a large range of products to

choose from a couple of filters and a long list of specifications.

14

How different is it in an Apple store. The purchase process is

designed to be an experience. The number of options in any

Apple product line is limited; Apple has pretty much made all

choices for you.

Also, the store is about much more than products. It is about

an experience, and it also offers other services such as

learning about using the product.

15

The interaction design of the e-commerce environment we

have in mind is modeled more after an Apple store than a Best

Buy store.

The purpose is to design the online retail environment in such

a way that we maximize the customer’s satisfaction with the

purchase process as well as the product they end up with, at a

minimal cognitive and affective effort.

16

This is how we do it from an interaction design point of view.

We invented Daniel the Virtual Merchant to represent our

interaction design. This is John, our online customer. Daniel

wants to understand John and categorize him based on a

“persona” – a rudimentary customer segmentation model to

deliver a mental picture and inform the sales process.

For this purpose, Daniel asks John a few effective questions

covering the “when, what and how” of the purchase, such as:

“what’s your budget”, “what do you want the product to do for

you?” and “how do you me to ask you questions about your

needs and preferences”?

17

Based on this information, Daniel the Virtual Merchant pegs

John to be a tech-savvy person so he is well informed about

the possibilities of a computer and in the sales conversation …

18

… John would like the information to be specification-based,

informing him in a factual way about the specifications of the

computer and he can derive the benefits himself.

19

To address John’s needs and preference, Daniel will take

John to a part of the store where they would find the higher

end notebooks with the more premium specifications to

support John making the right choice.

20

In the way we present information in an online retail

environment, we tailor the information presented to John by

focusing on specifications and in the process we come up with

a computer that has the specifications of John’s choice.

21

It works entirely different for Eva, our next customer. Eva does

not care about specifications. She is concerned about different

things focusing on what the computer would do for her and

what the benefits are.

22

For example, Eva wants to know if she can use the computer

to watch movies sitting on the couch with her boyfriend.

23

Or she wants to know if she can use the computer for her

work just as much as for her leisure activities, indoors and

outdoors.

24

For example, she wants to know if she can take her new

computer with her to a coffee house to work from there.

25

The sales conversation will focus on understanding those

needs and adapting the advice to make sure that Eva

understands the benefits of the computers of choice, instead

of “just” the specifications.

26

If Eva is presented with an option, Daniel the Virtual Merchant

presents the benefits instead of the specifications.

27

So the sales conversation of Daniel the Virtual Merchant

focuses first on understanding the customer and segmenting

them in order to serve as a basis for a rudimentary

classification in personas, taking that as a point of departure in

the sales conversation.

28

Then we go into the sales conversation itself, in which we can

choose to learn more about the customer needs and

preferences and have that inform the sales process itself.

For example, we can use the answers to previous questions to

refine our picture of the customer and have that inform the

next questions we ask, and the product we ultimately suggest

to the customer.

29

In order to see how this works, we created our own

playground in which we can we can experiment with ways we

take the participant on a journey to the desired product in a

more satisfying way.

Please note the similarity with A/B testing, nowadays a typical

approach to analyzing customer behavior in online stores.

The difference is that our playground is entirely experimental

and virtual and does not present a risk of losing sales.

30

A first building block is a replication of a common online retail

environment. We also call it an Elimination-By-Aspects or EBA

model. It consists of one big list of all products the customer

can chose from, and a set of filters to select and deselect

products.

31

The filters are actually based on the attribute levels, so if you

select them, they will help to reduce the choice set. Once the

customer has selected the desired product, he puts it in the

shopping cart and confirms the purchase of a single product.

32

Elimination-By-Aspects is a choice model. There are

alternative choice models that could be equally effective than

the EBA model to arrive at the desired product. Choice-based

conjoint or CBC is another choice model. In CBC, the

customer is exposed to a number of choice tasks in which we

systematically vary the attribute levels of the products present.

We derive the customer’s tradeoffs from the choices she

makes, which helps us identify the “optimal” product or a set

of “acceptable” products. We compute the acceptable product

on the fly and identify the product in the full set that comes

closest.

33

The set of modules in our play pen also includes a Build-Your-

Own (BYO) exercise. Like in CBC, we ask the respondent to

specify the desired product and then identify the closest

approximation in the list of available products. This is tricky

because to know which product comes closest, we need to

know the person’s tradeoffs. This can be measured by means

of CBC.

Oftentimes, we will need a combination of building blocks to

validly gauge a person’s preference. It presents the tradeoff

between collecting a valid read of the person’s preferences,

and the effort that we expect the person to put into the task.

34

Each building block has its layers to avoid information overkill.

Beneath the top layer we have lower layers with additional

product information. The information can be anything that

would normally be available in an online web store, and more,

to learn about the effect.

We will probably experiment with the information we deliver

and the way we deliver it, systematically playing with it to

know the impact of, for example, variations in reviews,

specifications and benefit descriptions.

35

The current version of our playground is to sell notebook

computers. We have included various building blocks in our

experimental environment.

Our playground consists of the building blocks EBA, CBC and

BYO which we use to determine which block, or combination

of blocks, is most effective to gauge a person’s preferences at

an acceptable cognitive and affective effort.

36

Within every building block, we systematically play with

elements to assess their impact on customer preferences and

the preference formation process.

37

Here we determine the order in which filters are presented

based on the respondent’s profile. If the customer has a

traveler’s profile, the order will be different from if the

customer has the profile of someone who focuses on graphics

editing, or purely on specifications.

Assuming that the customer wants to watch movies on a

couch, so battery life and screen size are of critical importance

and they are placed on top.

38

Also based on the respondent’s profile, we present the filters

as open or closed, and we label the suggested filter level with

an additional benefit description to promote specific levels.

The benefit information would normally only be visible by

clicking on the filter level. The benefit description will vary

based on the interest and profile of the customer set

beforehand.

39

The section to the right shows all products that the customer

can choose from. Each product has a tile with a small

description. A tile can be selected to access more detailed

information about the product. In this application, we present

the customer with rating information, which can either be

customer ratings or expert ratings.

A label is put over a product to emphasize a benefit. This

gives users the impression this product is more suitable for

their needs. Which product is or products are labeled, will be

based on the respondent’s profile and will be different for a

travel customer from the kitchen-table movie-watching

customer.

40

In a future paper we will share learnings about how customers

respond to our manipulations. The e-tailor program helps

ecommerce businesses to experiment and to learn how to

identify segments and then to tailor the task design and

information to the needs of the segments so that they search

more effectively and comfortably and are happier with the

result.

The e-tailor playground provides a cost-effective and risk-free

experimental environment that replicates e-commerce reality

and helps optimize e-commerce environments.

41

This presentation was delivered by Gerard Loosschilder, Chief

Innovation Officer and Willem Buijs, Interaction Designer, at

the Insight Innovation Exchange conference in the Georgia

Tech conference center in Atlanta (GA, USA) on June 18,

2014.

The presentation taps into insights extracted from SKIM’s E-

Tailor program, which combines insights from choice modeling

and interaction design to help drive the conversion and

satisfaction rates of online retail.

You can reach Gerard at g.loosschilder@skimgroup.com and

Willem at wjbuijs@gmail.com.

42