This is part 2 in a two-part arc trigged by reading Janet Driscoll Miller's interesting post, iPhone May Present New Mobile Design Challenges, on Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim blog.
I commented on the blog, "This reminds me of an early consulting project I was on. We saw from the client's web data that people were browsing their site using these odd sized, small screens. It was their browsing patterns that explained what was going on. We decided to create an all-text site to accommodate them and business went up. This was years ago, though. Nothing new under the sun, yes?" and am sharing more of this story in this arc. Part 1 described the problem and provided pointers to the solution. Here I share the solution itself.
As I wrote in the previous post, it's a fond memory and, at the time, it was a nice piece of research.
This was a case of listening to the silences rather than the sounds. The pauses in navigation were extremely regular, too regular and over too long a period of time, to be un-noteworthy. Also, the pauses had different periods depending on the visitor but were consistent time-wise by visitor; a visitor might have consistent pauses of three seconds and another perhaps of five, but the three-second visitor always had three second pauses, the five-second visitor always had pauses of five seconds.Was there variance? Yes, a little. That was a clue. The variance was organic (by which I mean "biologic") in nature, not inorganic (by which I mean "machine-based"). More correctly, the variance was biomechanical, not automated.
I thought about biomechanical mechanisms that follow pause-activity, pause-activity natures and realized I was observing cursorial tracking behavior. Humans, like wolves, are cursorial hunters. We use to jog after our prey and follow them. These evolutionary roots remain with us and even manifest themselves in screen navigation patterns.
Here I was witnessing people following prey, stopping to gather their kill, following prey, stopping to gather their kill, ... But I also knew nobody was navigating a website while killing that night's dinner.
What could my client's clients be doing that mimicked that behavior?
Because I worked in warehouses to support myself in high school and college I quickly came up with the answer; my client's clients were walking through their warehouse, stopping at each rack and checking inventory. The small and oddly shaped screen sizes were due to the end clients' realizing they needed to reorder something and coming to my client's website while the end client was checking inventory, carrying a handheld.
Why were only the top items on a given webpage being ordered? Because navigating a regular webpage much further was too much trouble.
Easy solution; offer a text only page for customers coming in through handhelds.
Yes, NextStage's client was thrilled. Their online sales increased dramatically, all the good stuff.
For me, though, it was the detective work, the research, that made it worthwhile.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
I'll be speaking at the Society for New Communications Research Annual Awards Gala Summit on 1-2 Nov 07 in Boston. Come on by and say hello.
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