Being in a mildly devil's advocate sort of mood :-)
On 16 Feb 2009, at 23:43, Anthony Hempell wrote:
[snip]
Marketing is pushing for a qualifying question up front that will
determine which product you are shown (i.e, you will not be shown
the other product).
Why?
Do they have reasons why they prefer that method? Is, for example,
having users of product A being aware of product B a bad thing? Have
they found it an effective sales technique? Something else?
We are pushing for an open site that will promote both products, and
give the users the ability to choose, and do qualifying as the first
step in ordering.
Are you going to get some users being annoyed by only discovering they
can get A when they had their heart set on B when they get to ordering?
The qualifying info may or may not be able to be stored in a
persistent cookie; so the UX might be really awful if you come back
and the site keeps asking you where you're from (plus other possible
questions).
If you're forcing the user to make the same decision multiple times
that's going to be bad. Whether that decision is a pre-qualification
question - or figuring out whether product A or B applies to them.
Besides the argument of user control over system control, can you
think of any other angles to try and sell this to the marketing folks?
* Demonstrate via storyboards how much longer it takes to use one
technique in given situations/user groups?
* Paper prototypes + users = demonstration of annoyance the solution
will cause?
I <heart> demonstrations :) Especially lo-fi ones that the other side
can be involved with.
I'd be all:
"Hi MarketingBob. I've been going over this product selection problem
and I'm a little confused."
<drag MarketingBob over to whiteboard>
"When we have a pre-qualification question we do get the advantage of
the user only seeing the product that applies to them."
<draw flowchart of this user path on whiteboard>
"The thing is - we've got [kind of user] where this will mean [problem
happens]"
<draw another flowchart on the wall>
"We could do [solution] instead which would give us"
<draw another flowchart on the wall>
"But that would mean with our original user we get..."
... I'm sure you get the picture :-)
It sounds, from your description, that the decision should be fairly
clean cut. The fact that marketing are so adamant about another
solution might mean that there's something we don't know about. A
conversation is the best way I know to dig that out.
Failing that you can often get the other person to "discover" the
"right" solution themselves. You rarely then have any difficulty
convincing them that their own idea is a good one :-)
I'm certain that it will adversely affect the sales of both
products if users have to continuously qualify themselves during the
research and decision process.
[snip]
Why does marketing believe that this annoying sounding process won't
affect sales? Might be worth digging into that also.
Cheers,
Adrian
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