Content Fairy – Guy Redwood's Blog

This week, we had a retailer of bathroom suites in for a day of eye tracking. The testing covered a range of customer journeys and a range of bathroom websites. Whilst I can’t disclose all the good stuff we discovered there is a key finding that I’ll share, as we’ve seen it many times before, in other B2C testing and one that may help a few online retailers out there.

As a retailer, you want to display your products in the best possible way, helping your customer choose the most suitable product. Logic tells you that the best way to do this it to have very clear photography of the actual products, helping the user see the differences between them.

Eye tracking showed us that the users do make initial decisions using the photography and then supporting information like price. We all know that good photography is the cornerstone of a successful online shop. What we saw again in this testing, is that users prefered to chose products that were displayed in room scenes that they liked, over products that were displayed individually. In essence, the users were buying a ‘look’ and not the product, even though the retailer is only supplying the key items displayed, not the total look.

What does this mean to a retailer?
If your product creates a ‘look’, I would recommend conducting some A/B testing to compare the effectiveness of scene photography and component photography. I would also make sure that you have a range of different scenes, so that your products look distinctly different. Displaying different products in the same room scene will not work. You need different products in different room scenes. The down side to this is that if the customer doesn’t like your room scene, they won’t buy the product.

How did we see this?
Eye tracking allows us to see through the users’ eyes and observe their decision process.

mini projectors are becoming more popular and this demo maybe closer to mainstream than you’d think. with a new generation gps device – you could mark up the world and subscribe to your prefered publisher of world notes/graffiti.

December sees the second girl geek dinner in Leeds. As someone schooled in a range of inner-city schools, some of them quite hard, I’m not a fan of exclusion. In it’s extreme, it can be fatal.

Creating an event that’s in a universal domain, and then telling people they’re not eligible to attend, because of their sex, is counter productive.

Do women in technology need special treatment?

Which then leads onto the flipside, what would a boy geek dinner look like?

To be honest I don’t care, gender shouldn’t exclude.

If you want to understand gender – go speak to Rikki.

Whenever our usability business engages with an online retailer who’s got a good proposition, I’m always a little envious of the position they’re in. Online retail is really exciting, the rewards are well earned for those that get it right and the detail people need to do on the customer journeys is big. For brief moments, I start to day dream and think of what I could do with their propositions… working 365 days a year, fulltime on a good retail site would be so much fun. Infact, as much fun as running an eye tracking company.

I have a few ideas on ways to help a few lucky retailers in an unconventional manner and will hopefully blog about it soon.

Leeds media website on the iPhone. Is that the best that Leeds has to offer? I’m guessing it also fails on the accessiblity front.