The case for removing features
I recently found myself in an unexpected position — arguing for the removal of features from our website.
Adding new features for your users is great. But it’s easy to forget to step back occasionally and review your product as a whole. In 2017, we prototyped, gradually rolled-out, and iterated upon two big new features on ArnoldClark.com that significantly change the way our customers send us vehicle enquiries:
- Delivery Centres allow our customers to have a vehicle they purchase moved across the country to a number of dedicated delivery locations with specialised staff, particularly useful for our customers in the south of England far away from our traditional car dealerships.
- Deal Builder allows our customers to get an instant online valuation of their car trade-in, indicate any outstanding finance they have, and try different finance options to see a more accurate monthly payment for a vehicle they’d like to purchase.
Both of these features are integrated with our vehicle product page, which is where most of our enquiries originate. However, there’s another way to submit vehicle enquiries. AC.com has a vehicle shortlist feature, which allows users to save interesting cars to view later. When viewing their shortlist, a user can select one or more vehicles and send an enquiry directly from that page, completely bypassing the product page and our new features there.
The ability to submit enquiries from the shortlist has existed on the site for a long time. And being able to submit a multi-car enquiry sounds like a useful feature. But missing out on delivery options and Deal Builder features made me wonder if this was still useful functionality for our customers.
There were other considerations, too. Our codebase was complicated with logic and UI for choosing multiple vehicles from the shortlist, making single and multi-vehicle enquiries play nice with our Enquiry Management system, and our email responders needed templates for both possibilities. The complexity here was slowing us down and making us reluctant to make changes.
Understandably, people get a little hesitant when you suggest removing features. Won’t customers be disappointed if a feature they use disappears? At Arnold Clark, we’re open to any changes that improve the customer experience, and we rely on data to help make our decisions. After a quick chat with my manager, I was asked to provide some data to justify my proposal.
In order to work out if removing this feature was an option, I began digging into our enquiry data and Google Analytics stats for the second half of 2017. After crunching some numbers, I discovered that:
- only 2% of vehicle enquiries originated from the shortlist;
- and while 82% of users who shortlisted a vehicle went on to view their shortlist, only 0.5% of those people interacted with the enquiry button on that page.
I shared my findings with the team, and after our standup the next morning, we took some time to discuss them. My manager was comfortable that the low usage figures justified removing this feature in its current form, and we spent a little time talking about the future potential for our shortlist functionality.
Our hope is that users who previously would’ve enquired via the shortlist will go on to visit the vehicle product page, where they can create a more detailed enquiry including delivery and car trade-in information, and have more contact options including phone and live chat. We’ll be watching our data carefully to see if we made the right choice.
With this feature removed, the user’s journey through the site becomes more focused. Combined with other refactoring work we’ve been doing on the shortlist functionality, it also gives us a more streamlined codebase to work on and the potential to add exciting new features in the future!
