Product configurator interview for Internet Retailer
I was recently interviewed for a series of articles published both online and in print for Internet Retailer. I always find it interesting to see which quotes are chosen by the writer and how comments are represented when an article is finally published. The two articles in which my comments were featured were:
Rich media wows shoppers, boosts sales and builds brands—if e-retailers build it right.
Consumer insights refine early version of Levolor.com product configurator
This article is specific to our site in which more of my comments about launching a product configurator were used from the original interview below.
Original Interview
The article was published as a result of the effort of Adobe Scene7's PR firm which is why you'll see a few of the questions below specific to Adobe's Scene7 product which we use for the interactive imagery in our product configurator.
In the spirit of full disclosure, and because I think the information in the answers below provides good background for companies considering product configurators, here is the full Q&A from the interview with additional links:
Q: When was the site launched? How long has the product configurator been on the site?
The product configurator was launched in June 2007.
Q: Please describe the product configuration capacity on your site and the underlying technology that powers it.
The product configurator is designed specifically for window treatments and supports 100s of billions of product combinations that are unique to the window covering industry. Technology used: PHP for the application layer, MySQL for the database layer, and Ajax for much of the real-time calls to the server throughout the configuration process. Scene7’s dynamic imaging component is used to visualize window treatments as they are built throughout the configuration process.
Q: Why is rich media and this tool in particular important to selling at Levolor.com? What does this interactive capacity add to the proposition that text and static images can’t accomplish?
Since we deal with a home décor product, the ability to visualize the custom-order product prior to ordering is important to our customers. The interactive capability allows for the many billions of combinations of our product to be visualized on-the-fly without having to individually create the accompanying static images. Scene7’s dynamic imaging technology enables us to dynamically call the visual components of a configured product.
Q: In choosing across the standard and custom options – and the different product categories (blinds, drapes, etc.) – how many combinations are possible? If that number isn’t available, how many options are there to choose from?
There are over 100 billion combinations for ordering our custom blinds and shades. This doesn’t mean there are 100 billion questions to answer in a single configuration, but rather the combination of product options, colors, and sizes equate to over 100 billion different ways our products can be ordered. For a consumer, custom blinds and shades are an investment in their home and the ability to see a visual representation of the product before it is ordered adds peace of mind.
Q: What were the challenges associated with getting this many images up online? How did you resolve the challenges?
The need for dynamic imaging was obvious. There was no way it was financially feasible to maintain billions of image combinations. By leveraging Scene7’s dynamic imaging technology, we were able to resolve this product data challenge.
Q: What are the challenges associated with making sure this many images are served in a timely way in response to site visitor requests? Could you have handled this on your own servers, do you use a content delivery network, or is this something Scene7 provides?
Scene7 provides the necessary capacity and delivery requirements to meet the needs of our end-users. Scene7’s technology was more of a foregone conclusion than it was for us to try and solve the “challenges associated with making sure this many images are served in a timely way in response to site visitor requests.”
Q: As you prepared to implement the product configurator, was there anything you learned in the process that caused you to adjust your initial plans in any way? How did you resolve that?
Assembling a team of product experts, web development experts, interactive experts, and usability experts proved to be the most challenging. Each functional expert approaches a product configurator from their own point of view and it made identifying the ideal user interface for our end-users a very time-intensive initiative. Having the ability to deliver dynamic imaging is only a fraction of the equation to a successful configurator. For Levolor, the product configurator is an ongoing product which is updated and improved on a daily basis based on changing consumer insights, trends, and technological enhancements.
Q: What advice would you have for other online retailers considering adding this much rich media to their site, from an operational perspective? Is there any different way you would approach this, based on what you learned from you initial experience?
A product configurator is an ongoing commitment and should be treated as a part of your organization’s product offering. It’s easy to launch a functionally-sound configurator online but very difficult to achieve consistently positive customer satisfaction without continuous improvement; particularly if your configurable products change on a yearly basis. All too often we see organizations invest in a product configurator but neglect to plan post-launch improvements. The end result is a product configurator plagued by costly & massive one-time updates because the budgets align with advertising & promotion rather than research & development. A&P budgets fluctuate considerably and having the budget significantly reduced one year (due to economic conditions or otherwise) can single-handedly cripple your product configurator’s effectiveness on your website. With interactive technology changing as quickly as it does, it’s important to stay on top of interactive and usability trends so you can stay ahead of the curve when it comes to customers interacting with your product configurator.
Q: What does it cost you to have the product configurator up on your site? Has the return been worth it?
No comment.
Consumer Insights: To research or not to research?
It's interesting reading about large consumer brands and their various methodologies for consumer research as it relates to new product development. In the consumables business, P&G is the heavyweight and is the pinnacle of research with their expertise in identifying the products that resonate with consumers. They also have manufacturing and distribution dialed in which makes them the "ideal" that many manufacturing-driven organizations aspire to be like.
Then there's Apple. Their products are generally always innovative and meet some consumer unmet need so well that people literally fall in love with their brand and products they pump out each and every year. Yes, there have been some duds (the Cube is one that comes to mind), but it doesn't happen often.
To research or not to research?
In a recent article from Fortune, Steve Jobs is quoted:
"We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products."
I found this to be fascinating. How can one of the most popular and successful consumer brands not perform any consumer research? Then I read the following quote:
"It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do.
So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse." ' "
Keep it simple, stupid
When one sits back and thinks about it, Apple really makes products people want. There's no real convincing that needs to happen as to why they they need an iPhone or iPod -- people just get it. The features offered on Apple's products are such "no brainers" that it's an obvious purchase the consumer wants...or rather, needs to make.
All Apple really needs to do with virtually any of its products is build awareness (which they are excellent at doing) and let the product do the work. They don't have ads or commercials explaining why a "touch screen" iPhone is better than a standard cell phone. They simply show the sexy design, a few things that it can do, and people are hooked -- they just get it.
What if you can't keep it simple?
When your product can't do this and you find yourself listing feature/benefit statements in every piece of marketing collateral, you know you've got an uphill battle ahead of you. Find that one thing that if a consumer sees it, they'll just get it and be sold on your product.
So, let's go out and quit doing research, right?
Apple's product portfolio is about 30 products (which is incredible for a $30 billion company), so they can be very focused on things they are good at. Other companies do not have such luxuries and simply do not have the bandwidth to be consumer experts in every single product line.
Usability studies for your website
The same can be said for websites, too. Sometimes, while online marketers and designers have the best intentions for site design, it does need to be tested and researched outside "the four walls" of the company to get real-world feedback. As sites scale, it's hard to keep your head wrapped around every single page, link, and graphic on the site. This is where usability studies come into play.
Usability studies are great for two reasons:
- They expose the huge gaps or even little intricacies that you may have overseen during the development stages. Better to capture these gaps now and fix them before rolling out features on a wide scale.
- Sometimes you need the validation from consumers about satisfaction ratings on the site -- often a point that needs to be used in a supporting argument for convincing upper management or potential customers that the site design, user interface, and/or information architecture is favored by consumers.
Sometimes you need consumer insights and market research to "sell" your ideas internally
Apple has the luxury of a CEO that understands the art behind product development and views things from a consumer standpoint. But it looks like he can also squash a project in its tracks without any consumer insights -- making a new product launch vulnerable to his own opinions. For the most part, Apple has been very successful with this model.
In other businesses, this is often not the case, and a website can be driven in a direction that can be misguided by upper management who may not "get" web design, navigation, and information architecture. Usability studies and consumer insights can be a powerful tool for not only consumers, but for you when "selling" the site internally.
Men’sHealth distributes online survey…instructs me NOT to use Firefox
Being very heavily involved in consumer insights, online surveys, and consumer opinions, I take interest in seeing how other companies are performing their data collection to improve their websites. We've recently launched the OpinionLab service. Mens'Health is partnering with Keynote to facilitate their online evaluation of the menshealth.com website.
What I found disappointing with the opening e-mail is the following message: "Study will work best if you...use IE Web browser (Firefox has unpredictable results)." See the image below for reference:
Naturally, I have several opinions about this e-mail:
- Consumers don't associate IE with Internet Explorer. This is web developer or web marketing speak. The average consumer will have no idea what #1 means in the above e-mail.
- "Firefox has unpredictable results" is not what I would lead with in any e-mail. If the application in which you want consumers to evaluate your site does not even work in their browser, then partner with another vendor who can provide a tool that is compatible with your audience's preferred web browsers.
- The assumption that visitors ALL use Windows and can readily access Internet Explorer (oh I'm sorry, "IE") is another bad assumption. I am a Mac user and always hated these types of assumptions because it directly affects my ability to participate in a site/survey. I want my opinion heard, but if you don't provide me with an alternate means to submit my feedback, then you're not doing your customers any favors.
I clicked on the "click here to start" link and instead of being presented with "unpredictable results," they flat-out deny access to the survey if Firefox is detected:
So basically, Internet Explorer 5.01 or higher and Windows 98 through Windows XP are compatible. IE 5 and Win98? No Firefox or Safari support? "Windows Vista support is on the way?"
Use Web Analytics to Justify Limiting the Compatibility of Your Web Applications
Use your web analytics packages to determine what the share of your visitors is in terms of the operating systems and web browsers they use. Make sure your online survey application works with your demographic. Firefox and Safari users account for 23% of visitors to SuperMotors.net. On Levolor.com they account for 16%. Those are very large percentages to be simply disregarding because you've partnered with the wrong vendor.
Moral of the Story
Browser and operating system specific websites are a product of the 1990's. It's 2007. Time to build web applications or partner with vendors who understand today's web user by accommodating multiple browser types and not alienating them for choices they make. Additionally, with the way the user is instructed to use IE instead of Firefox makes it sound like it's the user's fault for choosing an unpredictable browsing platform. You should never speak to your customers like this -- don't imply fault or incompatibility in decisions your customer has made. You must adapt to them, they should not have to adapt to you!
OpinionLab’s real-time feedback/rating tool (and why I love it)
Last week we implemented the OpinionLab real-time feedback/rating tool on Levolor.com. I can't tell you how helpful it's been in just 1 week of usage.
OpinionLab hosts a real-time survey/feedback tool which most of us recognize as the little spinning icon in the lower right-hand corner of some websites:
When the above icon is clicked on our site, it spawns a new window with a comment card like this:
This is simply a generic comment card that we have running site-wide. The consumer can optionally fill out as much or as little information as possible and even provide open-ended feedback in the comments field. OpinionLabs then stores this data on their server, logs the consumer's web browser, operating system, browser resolution, their responses, and the specific URL the comment was submitted on.
Keep your finger on the pulse of visitor satisfaction with your website
Over time, this information can be tabulated to gauge the satisfaction from a site-wide perspective, section perspective, or individual page perspective. At first, I was skeptical that consumers would actually use this feature, but they have been, and the feedback is outstanding. There is nothing quite like getting real-time feedback from consumers about all aspects of your website.
Accessibility and ease of use are critical
When feedback/comment cards are easily accessible, website visitors are much more inclined to use them. This is an important takeaway that I think web marketers often forget. Accessibility and ease-of-use are important factors for anything, not just comment cards: think e-mail marketing (being able to forward a newsletter to a friend), photos and videos (making it easy to send the photo/video to a friend), and sharing articles (again, being able to send a note to a friend quickly from the webpage, and not just copying and pasting the URL in an e-mail).
Real-time feedback is where it's at.
I'm convinced that this is where all websites need to be at if they want to continue to improve and offer any value to their consumers. Instead of sending out a survey once or twice per year and making huge, sweeping changes, real-time feedback allows you to test incremental changes and get feedback instantly from site visitors. CNN.com has released a beta of their website which contains rather drastic changes, but they've also implemented the OpinionLab tool to be able to collect all feedback regarding the beta:
Disruptive Innovations May Lead to Tunnel Vision
This post over at Brand Story got me thinking about how similar this topic is to strategic inflection points (from Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew S. Grove). I work in an industry where competition from product imports (from China) are a serious threat to our business. The discounts at which their products are sold are very challenging to compete with. Fortunately, we think we have disruptive innovations in the works, but reading the post at Brand Story really got me excited -- primarily because what we've got coming up over the next couple years is really exciting, and we're doing it right. There are however, downsides to new innovations that must be taken into consideration, namely tunnel vision.
Fortunately for our industry, competing profitably at much lower costs is not the end-all, be-all of business strategy. Driving costs down is certainly always top-of-mind when competing with imports and when dealing with retailers who private-label imported products to directly compete with your brand-name products. At the end of the day however, and this may be the case for several other industries, you've got an industry with a plethora of products and brands, all similarly priced, but giving the consumer serious information overload and confusion (ever tried shopping for blinds and shades in a retail store? 
).
Avoiding tunnel vision: Consumer insights are your friend!
Disruptive Innovations, while game-changers, cannot get away from the fact that consumers still need to understand how to shop your category and ultimately make a decision to buy. A lot of new product development may lead to tunnel vision -- being so focused on that great new feature, huge cost savings, adopting a "me too" product (playing "catch-up" to other competitor innovations), or a new type of product altogether, that sometimes the "big picture" is lost for consumers.
Tunnel vision is really hard to see while you're in development mode. You may begin to see it after the product is ready for consumer testing and you are able to take a moment and step back from the nitty-gritty and see just how consumers respond to what you think is an innovation. From a web development standpoint, it's very easy to get lost in the cool, new features of a website and completely forget that the consumer must actually find their way to your site at first, be aware of the new technology, and know how to navigate to this area of your site.
Don't forget the marketing
Worse yet, consumers may respond quite well to the innovation itself during the consumer insights session, giving you the reinforcement you'd be hoping for -- but your innovation may tank in the marketplace. The branding, marketing, advertising, and/or overall awareness will help bring your disruptive innovation to its full potential.
Sometimes, this is the most critical component. You may have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, or it's buried in an aisle of other similarly confusing products, then you're back to square one. Don't forget to think "big picture" when it comes to consumers -- it's very easy to get lost in the industry competitiveness. Consumers insights and evaluating all aspects of the innovation are critical to success. This applies to many businesses, not just manufacturing companies -- web companies are just as guilty (Google is a major offender: I just discovered Google Browser Sync, nearly a 1-year old product and I love it! But where's the marketing for it?).
Blog by Eric Long
I'm an experienced online marketer, information architect, digital strategist, and social media enthusiast. I'm passionate about providing outstanding cross-channel experiences for considered purchases (with a focus on mass customization).
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