Looking past metrics: understanding user experience
A funny thing happened this past weekend. My mother asked me to help with some of her holiday shopping. We’d planned on visiting one store in particular, and low-and-behold, the day before our shopping excursion, I received an email from this retailer offering 30% EVERYTHING in-store, all weekend long. “Perfect!” I think, and I forward the coupon off to my mother to print and bring along…
Well she had difficulty printing it. I ask what happened, and the answer was “the email doesn’t show up.” (After investigation: her email client blocked images and she didn’t even know how to activate images!) Now you may be thinking this is one of those ‘my cute ol’ ma who can’t work a computer’ type stories, but the fact is, my mom is a programmer and IT consultant who’s been using computers longer than most of us even knew they existed!
It’s becoming more apparent to me, that many email users don’t necessarily know about image-blocking features, or even how to activate images, yet so many retailers continue to send all image-based email. I suspect these retailers look at their metrics and say “Well, we’re within industry norms, so it’s all good.” In reality, industry norms are quite low (and always decreasing) so why wouldn’t we all strive to improve and blow these so-called norms out of the water?
However, this tendency to look beyond metrics isn’t just happening in email.
Justin Palmer from Palmer Web Marketing shares a story on the failure of web analytics– Basically he observes his wife using an e-commerce site. He notices she looks and interacts with elements on the page he wouldn’t have even considered–or that an analytics tool wouldn’t pick up on, and advises us to use eye-tracking heat maps to better understand our users. Great idea!
Don’t get me wrong– web analytics and email metrics are absolutely essential and provide great insights into how people interact with your brand. They just don’t always show us the whole picture. This is why testing is key to improving success–both on your web site and in email.
UPDATE: This issue may be bigger than you think… Bryan Eisenberg of GrokDotCom today blogged about Future Now’s recent release of its 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey, which gave retailers a failing grade in Customer Experience! Yikes!
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