| They Came From Beyond Space: the challenge of tracking behaviour
Abstract
This paper relates the lessons of physical shopping to the challenges of consumer ecommerce sites. It relates the fieldwork of Paco Underhill to the online usage environment, and outlines how the techniques could be migrated from the physical to the virtual world. Finally, the paper introduces the Patterns Movement in systems design, and proposes how this discipline can be used to generate more successful ecommerce sites. How Real People Shop One of the most influential (and entertaining) business books of recent months is Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping. It's a fast read that sets out the lessons learned by Underhill and his team during twenty years of painstaking consumer behaviour tracking. Underhill really does track 'the animal that shops', collecting precise data on how long people look at packages, how many times they touch products compared to how many products they purchase, and other variables of the shopping jungle. The data is used to discover general principles of store layout and package design, yielding interventions that improve sales. A striking feature of Underhill's work is that his results have the authentic ring of commonsense, yet they are wrung from repeated observation, not intuition. His advice isn't based on theories, but on practice. What relevance does Underhill's work have to the animal who e-shops? Much of it is related to the physical facts of human interaction in space: the 'butt-brush' effect that makes us uncomfortable browsing in crowded aisles, or the folly of putting XXL garments near the floor. I've written elsewhere that the absence of physicality in cyberspace demands that ecommerce players compensate by filling their sites with signs of community - a sense of the presence of other people. Clearly the development of community has benefits for ecommerce sites, but the research apparatus described in Why We Buy suggests an alternative approach. Why not simply observe how people interact with ecommerce sites, and see what patterns emerge? Route Causes There's plenty of opinion about what makes for good website design, but little that I have seen treats what we could call the route characteristics of user interaction. Good website design tends to stress usability of information resources, and looks at layout, sectioning and signage. But a purchase transaction is the outcome of a series of interactions that itself describes a route through layers of pages, each layer marking a stage in the business process. The route taken by a user may be one of many possible routes afforded by the site's design. Many sites contain routes that loop, continually whisking users away from the outcome they seek. In some sites it's possible to fill your shopping cart but hard to see the checkout. Most of the time the checkout will be there, but just not noticed or registered by the user. The parallels with the physical retail world start to become clearer. The wisdom of physical stores is that aisles contain products, and checkouts are sited at exits or traffic nodes. Yet the reality in physical stores is that sometimes checkouts are obscured, or marooned by informal traffic diversions generated by the siting of promotional displays. It's only by watching what happens in stores that such patterns emerge, and that rules of thumb can be produced. Shadows and Substance User tracking is of course a major topic in the online world. Webmasters and marketers pore over analyses of webserver traffic, cross-relating sales to numbers of visits and time online, and weeding out low-hit pages. This is all well and good: but it's a little like trying to guess the colour of someone's shoes from the footprints they leave behind. Page-views and their sequences don't measure everything we want to know. They are the shadows, not the substance, of user interaction. It's time that some enterprising folks went out into the field - into internet cafes, offices and homes - and started observing how people really use ecommerce sites. Pre- and post-session interviews could yield insights into why individuals approach the sites they do, and how satisfied they feel afterwards. Underhill-style timings of page usage might start to reveal some discrepancies with the webserver data: some of those long-period usage sites are undoubtedly playing to empty space while the visitor goes for coffee. The technology of software usability labs - eyeball trackers, variable lighting - might be subtly introduced to some observation environments, yielding true data on ad 'impressions'. And if someone somewhere makes a frown-ometer, that could come in handy for measuring confusion and irritation. Patterns of Ecommerce Interaction Routes Systems folks with an interest in design issues may notice a parallel here with the Patterns Movement in systems architecture. Practitioners who sensed that they were continually reinventing particular programming wheels began to ponder the contexts in which they applied such generic solutions, and to describe their solutions to each other. Such 'patterns' provide a vehicle for communicating design issues - a vehicle that previously did not exist in the computing discipline. Patterns have proved one of the most successful innovations at the analysis and design end of the systems project. It's commonplace to hear designers discussing the principal features of a new system in terms of named patterns from the public domain. Now systems architects can communicate with reference to a shared body of professional, experential knowledge, just as 'real' architects and engineers do when they talk of arches or voids, struts or valves. Physical and Virtual The patterns concept is borrowed from the world of physical architecture, and in particular the work of Christopher Alexander. Alexander championed architecture rooted in the goals and behaviours of the people who would use the resulting building. He and his followers see their sites as arenas of activity; places where personal, social and spiritual desires play themselves out. The patterns that Alexander describes owe something to eastern philosophies of balance and harmony, and something to the traditions of vernacular builders - the countless, nameless people who erected the world's barns and churches in the generations before the ivory tower appeared on the landscape. Why We Buy is a patterns text: it describes recurrent problems in design, discusses the forces acting in each case, and suggests generic solutions. But Underhill is suspicious of the 'cyberjockeys' who control most ecommerce sites, and their apparent lack of regard for the shopping experience and the relationships, behaviours and rewards it embodies. Systems architects should take up the challenge and apply the spirit of pattern-based design to the domain of ecommerce interaction routes. There are few areas in today's climate where the application of systems insight can have such a profound effect on the success of a business. The ability to integrate ecommerce facilities with legacy systems is a more obviously pressing concern for many; yet the power to deliver successful ecommerce outcomes to online shoppers will separate the winners from the losers in the long run. It's time to gather that missing observational data on customer behaviour, hatch the patterns of ecommerce interaction routes, and build a generation of virtual stores for physical people.
Homepage of the Patterns Movement Verista opinion piece on The Displaced Body Books available from Amazon.com: Paco Underhill: Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping Christopher Alexander: The Timeless Way of Building
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© 1999 Paul May