Don’t Add Features, Add Scenarios

In an attempt to offer customers more value, many marketers and website managers introduce new features to their sites. The process for deciding which features to develop can be convoluted, and unduly influenced by various forces such as politics, personal preference, knee-jerk reactions to what the competition is doing and misunderstood performance data. If the right steps aren’t taken, site upgrades invariably yield unexpected results and poor return on investment. In this article, we outline an approach to planning site improvements that puts users at the center of the process to ensure the highest chance of success.

The first step is to change your way of thinking. Don’t think of your site enhancements in terms of new features, but rather in terms of new scenarios. Scenarios are a popular design method that puts the user at the center of the process by first identifying a goal that you know they would like to easily achieve while visiting your site, then verbally describing the details of their experience, from beginning to end, to achieve that goal. By putting the focus on the user instead of a specific part of the site and the technology that drives it, your perspective broadens and it’s easier to see the big picture. Often in an interactive environment, the experience isn’t compartmentalized or linear. Thinking in terms of features is often very limiting, boxing you into a narrow part of the experience, making it hard to see how related elements, functions, etc. play a part in helping the user achieve their goal.

Planning and designing site upgrades using scenarios creates a better opportunity to get early validation from users because it is presented in a context that they can relate to and respond to, either favorably or not. It takes the proposed improvement out of the abstract and presents it in more tangible terms of achieving a desire you’re assuming the user has. Then, it gives them an accurate picture of how that desire will be fulfilled. Getting users’ early buy-in on those two critical things – the value of the goal and the best way to allow users to achieve it – will help site owners avoid costly mistakes.

As an example, one of our technology manufacturing clients expressed interest in adding an ROI calculator to their site. Taking a feature-based perspective, we could have designed such a tool and allowed users access to it by placing a persistent link in a prominent location somewhere within the site interface. Instead, we translated the request into a user scenario. The first step is to identify the real user goal that such a feature would satisfy. In this case, an ROI calculator would be used mainly by prospects to help create a business case for purchasing one of our client’s products. Framing the problem that way exposed more opportunities to serve the user and influenced how and where the ROI calculator would be made available within the site experience. The scenario looked like this:

Goal: Get info to make a business case for purchase
When prospects are a little further down the decision path to purchase, they may have to present a case to someone within their organization to justify the purchase. Anything we can do on the website to recognize this need and help the prospect will be a good thing.

• Within the site, there will be an option to access an overview of why our products are the best.
  
• Within the overview, we will emphasize all of the brand’s differentiators such as its history of innovation, and the fact that it designs, engineers and manufactures all of its own equipment, allowing for greater quality control, etc. We will also link to testimonials and awards to show credibility.
• Within the site we will make online tools available to justify the expense of acquiring our solution – such as a cost savings calculator. There are different options to execute this that need to be discussed. If implementing an online tool proves too tricky at the time being, at a minimum we should promote the fact that an ROI specialist (inside sales) is just a phone call away and that they can provide a detailed ROI analysis, custom tailored to the prospect’s unique situation.
  
• In their pursuit of creating a sound business case, prospects may want to ask for help from a reseller. From everywhere within the site we need to make it easy to find a reseller that can help them.
• We may consider creating a special section of the site, dedicated to allowing users to achieve the specific goal of creating a business case for purchase.

As you can see, in this scenario, we are empathizing with the user to really understand the context of the problem and the user’s process in order to anticipate their needs in the way we craft the interactive experience. This scenario was well-received in early testing which leads the Rhythm team to believe that the return on investment will be much greater than if we had just added the ROI calculator willy nilly.

There are many articles and books that go into depth about scenario design and the advantages of using it. It’s well worth looking into because after making this important mindset shift you’ll be in a much better position to realize greater results from your interactive user experiences.