MY AT TENTION SPAN IS VERY SHORT

Thoughts on how to retain customers’ attention once you’ve obtained it. @ironside

MILLENIALS BEHAVE LIKE DUG

SQUIRREL!!https://youtu.be/SSUXXzN26zg

8 SEC ONDSMicrosoft research (https://goo.gl/G9OoRC) found that the human attention span has dropped from an average of 12 seconds in 2003, to just 8 seconds in 2013.

Researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the brain activity across three types of attention: sustained, selection and alternating.

WHAT’S MY POINT?Don’t neglect to invest in the on-site or in-app experience prior to customer aquisition, because lots of people do.

ABOUT ME

I’ve spent the past 6 years working with brands around the world in helping customers best find what they want.

Since graduating with a degree in Computing Science, I’ve moved from software development to technical consultancy, business analysis and now product management; all of which have focussed on the wonderful world of search and navigation.

THE BASICS

Ranking Attribution

Tracking

RANKING

Be sure to show your best product as well as an attractive reflection of your range. Try to also factor in buying habits across territories.

I may be biased here, but I don’t believe anyone does this as well as what we’ve put in place at ASOS over the past two years. The implementation works on the hypothesis that a strong initial sort order prevents accidental product elimination. We know that our customer is primarily interested in new product, however, we sacrifice some sorting efficiency in order to showcase the full product range. Note how differently this is tailored between the UK and DE stores. Recommended reading: https://goo.gl/tN4wwK

ATTRIBUTION

Everything digital is powered by quality attribution; it’s that age old advice about GIGO.

Attribution powers two key aspects to the customer’s journey: understanding (language) and navigation. International site managers with native language skills are a must. Customers frequently feedback on the quality of automatically generated translations, damaging brand perception. I’d recommend conducting customer research to ensure that you’ve adopted the same terminology as your target market. Bear in mind that this’ll help in search matching as well as filtering. Make sure to support synonyms too. Lastly, use UX tricks when possible to promote customers into adopting refinements.

TRACKING

Be this guy on the right and measure everything. Have clear business objectives. Tell everyone about them & openly report on them. Invest in quality analysts.

We live in a data-driven industry (at least we should do), so hopefully the need for analytics isn’t a hard one to sell to you. However, I’ve yet to see a brand who have really nailed the tracking side of things to the extent by which they have the resource and data confidence to identify customer pain points, as well as the causes behind them. If you’re the exception to the norm, then be thankful for your position!

PLANNING FOR TOMORROW

Natural Predictive

Personalised

NATURAL SEARCH

In my experience, just 20% of customers who browse engage with search - however they tend to be 4x more likely to convert.

The reason as to why is simple: they’ve been motivated enough to undertake the cognitive effort required to articulate what it is that they’re looking for. As long as the search functionality returns relevant results, it’s likely that they’ll move to purchase. The market has seen a large shift toward enabling customers to search in more natural (read: more intuitive) ways, such as showing you (visual) or describing (verbal) what they want. Recommended reading: https://goo.gl/G2wdCO https://goo.gl/zlQVTb https://goo.gl/71qTmm

PREDICTIVE SEARCH

Utilise previous search data to predict what customers want next - be it offering useful navigation steps or promoting relevant product.

This is nothing new - but who is really doing it well? To my mind, we can only really cite the big content aggregators such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, Pinterest or Netflix. In fact, 75% of customers now say that they expect personalised experiences (https://goo.gl/wYMWZP). But there are opportunities in this space. What if we showed dynamic content spots, changing based on whether you refined by a low price point or were seen to look at refinements but not select any? (hint: show some trend-based content) More interesting still would be to change the product information shown based on what customers refine by, or use social channels to infer whether someone is about to go on a holiday in the sun.

THAT P WORD… AGAIN

Whether you like it or not, I argue that the future success of maintaining customers’ attention comes down to your personalisation strategy.

I’m sure that doesn’t come as a surprise, but it’s also not a cop-out; 8 seconds (remember that’s the average) is not a lot of time. My point is that the standards listed before (ranking, attribution, tracking), along with new tools which lessen cognitive load, are likely still going to show the customer a large amount of relevant product for them to sift through. The secret is going to lie in knowing your customer and utilising the predictive side of things to effortlessly show them what they’ve been looking for, or perhaps didn’t know that they wanted. Doing so should be achieved through any form of medium, so don’t assume this can only happen within your ecosystem.

THANKS FOR LISTENING

Feel free to get in touch with me on twitter via @ironside to discuss this or all things search.