On Marketplace Design, Part One
An Essay on Critical Digital Marketplace Design Elements and Their Relationships to Consumer Purchasing Theory
Intention
The purpose of this essay is to induce conversation around the design and implementation of digital marketplaces. Included are a collection of ideas around current states, best practices, and potential future directions of the online interaction aspect of capital transference.
Preface
The concept of a marketplace is not new. A well defined space that allows for the distribution of goods and exchange of tender has thousands of years of history. Although digital versions of marketplaces are relatively new, the principles that lead to successful sales in the physical marketplace are the same in the digital space. Namely, having an outward and obvious product selection, an easily navigable and pleasant storefront, a transparent and intelligible pricing model, and a simple and efficient route to purchase and exit from the marketplace are paramount to a lucrative marketplace.
The concepts of prompting multiple purchases and repeat purchases develop from the community that essentially defines and propagates the marketplace. Elements such as reviews, social sharing, and careful advertisement of the communities purchasing habits are essential ingredients here not only for the buyer community, but also for the merchant community.
As the vibrant marketplace organism conducts its business, the human interactions that occur with products, the environment, and amongst humans themselves provide a bountiful landscape for user research and inherently for user-focused designers to create new marketplaces for the contemporary physical and digital realms. Ultimately, this research and ongoing dedication to revision of design eases the ability of consumers to purchase goods; it does not induce a seemingly fundamental aspect of humans to exchange currency for products and services.
Of course it makes sense that during this multi-millenial evolution of viewing and purchasing goods, a handful of human traits that are elicited during the shopping process are found to repeat themselves over and over again. And, by focusing the direction of design toward satisfying or pacifying these traits, we fine tune the marketplace organism for ease of use and purposeful expediency.
Creating lasting or sticky impressions of the marketplace will generate repeat customers and catalyze recommendations for new visitors. It is through this social conversation that the marketplace becomes more than a digital vehicle for goods or services; it becomes a living framework for the facilitation of new ideas and a landscape for a thriving community. Interestingly, it also gains a tone of invisibility as a method for purchasing items that quietly serves its customers flushing them through a process of acquired satisfaction and maybe even happiness. It is the pinboard for products, the waiting line, the register, and the beautiful shopping bag. It is the council lodge for merchants and a hub for new product innovation. The marketplace amplifies the voices of all parties and goods naturally.
The Landing Page
The landing page may not be the first impression of the marketplace for the consumer- there may have been other marketing collateral that has drawn them here. For example, advertising in motion or static forms may have been distributed, or even simple word of mouth. However, it is likely that it is their first interaction experience with the marketplace proper; and the implied ease of use and professionalism in the presentation of this first impression are keys to the retention and growth of the consumer basis of the marketplace. The critical features of product selection, interface navigation, transparent pricing, and path to purchase must be considered thoroughly during marketplace design as they will surely be noted and accepted or rejected by the customer.
The landing page in the digital space is the physical storefront- it can parallel the look of other existing storefronts and contain certain common elements, but should contain a few elements that distinguish it as a unique entity in this space. We can focus on three key elements that will set the marketplace apart from existing fronts. The company logo or store name is one element, another is the layout of the landing page and its associated navigation scheme. A third element of distinction, perhaps not entirely obvious, is the content.
While the marketplace logo or name should strive for character, or a unique identifier that encourages verbal repetition of its existence, it must at least be somewhat memorable and unobtrusive during the shopping experience. We understand that at this point, the customer has already entered the store, regardless of the name. If we embrace this fact, the name and logo serve as vehicles for community buzz building rather than as incentives for first time purchases. In this way, they can be mute or dumb so long as they act as a reference point of navigation for the buyer.
It should be noted that with regard to navigation, there are essentially three areas that require devoted attention to detail; focusing design efforts on these areas will provide the best user experience in the shopping context. One area is the header or side bar, which contains the store logo, as it is used to navigate back to the landing page from elsewhere, as well as other supplemental elements such as a search bar, shopping cart, help link, and corporate offerings. A second area of navigation is the ‘product info container,’ the pieces of which are detailed below, where the tone of a marketplace is set essentially by virtue of that fact that a product’s existence instantiates the foundation of a market at all. The third area of navigation is the option of categorical filtering and product display. This meta navigation is the preliminary way a user will isolate the products they are interested in prior to engaging the shopping flow itself. Although careful planning, design, and iteration over these three areas of navigation will lead to an exceptional user shopping experience, there is perhaps a fourth area- the envelope of the three areas, the common thread, or existing intention of parallelism, or the glue of the experience should also be considered thoroughly.
It cannot be overstressed that the landing page layout and navigation scheme should be obvious to the consumer in terms of arrangement of products; possibly by groups or categories if appropriate. This ‘obviousness’ can be a mixture of near-immediate learned behavior and a knowledge recall action of previous similar experiences. This mixture of learned and recalled comprehension will help build a cognitive relationship between the user and the marketplace. Since mental and emotional investment of user action establish customer loyalty and ‘stickiness’ through the concept of rewarded behavior, for example, a conscious application of this mixed design can be fruitful for the marketplace to establish a unique and successful identity.
For the digital space, it is typical to have a representative icon or image for the product and a name. Depending on the type of product, for example a software offering, it is useful to show a date that the software was released. This will inform customers of the newness of products and set the age and relevance of the marketplace itself in the minds of customers through a method of ‘guilty by association.’ If the products are new, the marketplace retains its relevance. In the case that outside developers contribute to the marketplace, the dating scheme will also set an internal competition amongst similar offerings to have the latest and greatest product. The concept of newness of products as incentive to purchase, and perhaps purchase at a higher price, is an old lesson dating back thousands of years and is part of the theory around customer-perceived value.
The description of a product, at least a brief one, should be added to the product’s ‘container of information’ if space allows and especially if the marketplace is new to the field. The description is often left off of digital store landing pages because of the space it can consume and that it adds visual noise to the shopping experience. However, because of this fact that it is often absent, the use of it can serve to separate the marketplace apart from its competitors. Having as much information up front to a customer as possible without crowding the path to purchase establishes trust and customer satisfaction simply because it is an element of open and honest communication. Again, the existence of these short descriptions is an additional marketing tool for individual contributors to the marketplace wherein they can differentiate themselves and lure the consumer to the product focus page and ultimately a checkout confirmation. As the marketplace matures, and more products crowd the landing page, the description may no longer be necessary to establish trust and the product representation served through its icon or image may stand as enough of a description and differentiator than a few lines of text.
It is worthwhile here to note that the potential parallelism between the gallery display of products for sale and other forms of consumable media, for example news articles, helps establish a sense of security and trust for the user. Through the employment of parallels between the marketplace context, which can be sensitive due to its financial exchange nature, and other less financially ‘harmful’ contexts such as news websites, the user is more comfortable with navigating and exploring the market. This may be obvious if we consider the fact that as humans we are more comfortable in familiar surroundings than in foreign ones.
The product price is another element that does not often show on many current digital marketplace landing pages. It is interesting to consider in what contexts the prices of goods and services are displayed up front in the physical realm. For example, car dealerships typically have prices prominently displayed, the same for most food chains, and gas stations. Department stores vary with having price tags outward and apparent versus tucked within clothing items. It does not seem that there is a logic between the cost of something, its availability, its ‘originality,’ and the transparency of its price; we can always find exceptions to imposed rules. While hiding price can catalyze interest of a customer in a product to learn more about it, displaying it prominently can again establish a foundational trust between the customer and the marketplace. It forces honesty and is another point of potential competitive advantage among contributors.
Within the digital selling space, just like the physical analog, prices may only be starting points that, after a user configuration, may change significantly. Purchasing a car is a great example in the physical space where base or standard configurations are more than likely upgraded before the vehicle rolls off of the lot. As a digital example, a user may want to purchase licensed software to run on more than the default number of servers. In this way, the price advertised on the product gallery page may say something like, “From $299,” and then the product detail page may contain a configuration calculator for the user to tailor their purchase to their specific needs.
There may also be free trials or free samples that should be advertised as appropriate on the landing gallery page. If we consider the interaction of this ‘button’ for a moment, we see that the user could take at least two paths toward a product procurement. One is that the free trial button click opens a dialog where the user inputs an email in order to receive a link for downloading. Another interaction is that the trial button click takes the user to the product detail page, and from there the user has the ability to input information relevant to the acquisition. We immediately recognize the time-based difference between these two paths and can uncover a few advantages and disadvantages for each. For example, if we utilize the latter path, we are somewhat burdening the user with extra effort to get what they want- yet we are also keeping the user engaged in the marketplace and have the opportunity to visually entice the user to actually purchase the product, or related ones, rather than allowing the easy drive down the free path. It is well known by shopping mall designers that the longer the shopper is kept in the mall, the more likely they are to purchase something; hence the existence of food courts. We can extend this notion to our trips to club stores such as Costco where free samples are in abundance on Sundays especially. In this case, the free food appeases our exhaustion during the shopping process and increases our positive mood and chances of purchasing something-anything. Now, relating this back to the digital marketplace, we can make the free trial process even easier and gain the value of user contact information. Imagine that the user has the ability to subscribe to all of the free trial offerings within the entire marketplace. In this scenario, the user inputs their contact information to create an account and then can select multiple free trial products for downloading and will receive notifications of future offerings. Here, the user is basically mentally, emotionally, and physically investing themselves into the marketplace; an investment that will establish a fairly strong bond between the user and the marketplace. This multi-trial method is not currently common practice in digital marketplaces, but could be easily implemented. There are numerous positive outcomes for the marketplace if this method of propagating free products is used beyond customer tie-in that are worth further discussion, but outside the scope of this essay.
It has become expected in the digital marketplace context to have some sort of rating or review mechanism and an archive associated with products for sale. It is often the case that purchasing decisions are based in large part on reviews; which is not surprising considering the human tendency to base decisions on the success or failure of others’ decisions or at least on a gradation of a collectively accumulated probabilistic outcome. It is interesting to note the willingness of people to submit their positive and negative experiences in socially public digital contexts- this is likely in part due to a desire to influence future purchasing outcomes, to shape future product developments, and to display or express personal voice in a large arena. Given the willingness of customers to expend energy in a marketplace, and often in significant quantity and quality, it has become powerful for marketplaces to allow, encourage, and promote the ability to for customers to read and write reviews. Though perhaps obvious, it should be stated directly that through the empowerment of the consumer, the marketplace itself is empowered since it is born and will proliferate through the consumer’s existence and actions. Again, we see the marketplace as merely a landscape for the enablement of sales- the desire to buy and exchange is inherent.
The usual representation of reviews contains three pieces, a graphic of approval (in the form of stars, or thumbs up, or something), an overall mean rating, and a total count of the reviews. Some marketplaces will also show an associated negative count (e.g. a thumbs up and down), for example movie purchasing sites, but negativity can be associated beyond the product to the market itself and so should be avoided. Negative reviews and ratings should be made available to continue the build of honesty, but displayed in a way where they are broken out from the positive reviews, rather than as standalone components. This is a grey point, but negativity should be viewed as a part of positivity and not separate. The overall mean of the reviews helps to differentiate those reviews where many ratings are high for a group of products and influence tough purchasing decisions amongst similar offerings. The total count of reviews implies popularity in a positive or negative way. This variable can be quite powerful for a merchant to display their prominence as a leader in the marketplace among other properties.
A note on the absence of reviews: When a marketplace first opens, the space is new and the products offered may be new as well. In this scenario, there may not be any reviews in the beginning throughout the market. Even if the marketplace has been open for some time, new products will start with zero reviews. There is not a need to fear a lack of reviews. We’ve mentioned the need for reviews, and it is more important to have at least the opportunity for reviews to exist rather than the existence of thousands of reviews. The display of zero reviews for a product can act as a catalyst for community growth around the market by invoking the human desire to participate. For example, the concept of ‘be the first to review’ contains three enticing factors: the chance to contribute to something through reviews, the ability to be first in a perceptibly large population, and the chance to attain an identity or ‘be’ something beyond a current physical state as a digital citizen. Also inherent in the ability for reviewing is merchant competition. Here, merchants of the marketplace compete for the best rating and will deliver products that attempt to achieve that rating. Ultimately, this propels a higher quality of the marketplace overall. An alternative to reviews like star ratings and customer feedback is a count of downloads. Expansions around this count could include ‘installs,’ ‘active users,’ ‘upgrades,’ and so on.
The Product Focus Page
Support exploration and guide toward a purchase commitment.
The user has reached this page through a specific intention; most likely they were trying to find more information prior to making a purchase. This information collection process could be for the purpose of comparison shopping with similar offerings, as part of a traditional procurement process for accounting and billing, to explore the product landscape and see what’s new and available, or because the user is looking to release a product of their own and is sizing up the competition. Of course, various other reasons could land a user on the product page, and hopefully those are accounted for during any acceptance testing. An example here is when the user has the product in their shopping cart and then needs to return to the product page to edit some product properties. The desired user flow is to return to the cart now, rather than visit it for the first time. At this point, the user has different expectations and the ‘action language’ on the page should accommodate this stage of the purchase process.
If we examine the product detail page from a perspective of a first-time visit, the page should obviously show product information in a format that is easy to navigate, but the page design should also consciously attempt to retain the user’s focus on a path toward a purchase. The ability to place the item in a cart or perform a quick checkout should be apparent and in high contrast to the other information on the page.
The need for this ‘obvious appearance’ of a path to purchase is not unique to the digital purchasing context. In the physical shopping world, registers and cashier lines are at the fronts of many stores so that the shopper can be catalyzed by the checkouts of others and be drawn into the ‘group frenzy.’ In the store-forward location, the registers also play the role of an anchor point in the mental navigation process of shopping and act as the success gateway on the way to the egress. Passing through the register area on the way out of the store can inspire feelings of satisfaction and personal pride, whether the shopping event was a pleasant one or if the shopper, or their companions, are simply happy to be leaving. In the context of a department store, registers are located throughout individual departments, to ease the purchase process in terms of saving the shopper from walking long distances and to facilitate quick focused purchases. And yet, through this compartmentalization of product and checkout point, the shopper is more likely to conduct more purchases because of the potential to walk through various departments. There is also the potential for the shopper to spend more money in the store if they visit more than one purchase point because the total purchase is quantized into smaller more digestible chunks; the total is forgotten and the sensitivity to great financial impact is not activated. Some stores also have their registers located in the back which places a focus on the store’s offerings, rather than the purchase process, and can act as a security precaution. It should be noted that a currently rising purchasing trend employs mobile points of purchase where a store representative can process an order at any location in the building through a tablet with a card reader accessory.
In the digital context, there are several elements that have become standard to show on the product detail page. Many of these are carried over from the marketplace landing page and enhanced, such as the product icon, title, description, product reviews, and author. The product icon is often enlarged, but this is not necessary since it can divert focus from the purchase. The product description is often lengthened and broken out at this point to include details such as what’s new, revision history, compatibility, links to documentation and license agreements, and notes. These product detail breakouts should be organized thoughtfully from most exciting, like ‘what’s new in this release,’ to more banal details such as compatibility. In this way, the action potential for buying the product is greatest at the point of first impression and, through contrast to more boring information further down the screen, the user gravitates back to an excited state.
A review section containing all reviews is often present and can be contained in a tab-based navigation scheme or exist after the product description on the screen. When considering location of the review section, realize that this data is utilized by many shoppers; think about making the easiest path possible from this area to the purchasing action (button or otherwise). If the user needs to scroll to view the reviews and loses sight of the the purchase button, an opportunity to retain shopping focus is lost and the user must re-engage with the purchase flow and reorient their mental navigation on the page. Consider implementing a new action button next to a top-rated review like ‘I’m inspired- buy now,’ to harmonize the experience of buying based on the advice of others and then reward those that inspire purchases.
Another common element that can help facilitate purchase from this screen is the availability of product screen shots and introduction videos. These screen shots should be present in some sort of thumbnail form and large enough to produce a general concept or experience for the user around the product’s various abilities and contexts. The screenshots can be activated to show an enlarged view, as this is an expected behavior currently, but realize that any complex enlargement and navigation of the screenshots should be avoided because it detracts from the purchase flow. Incorporating a ‘buy’ button into the enlarged screenshot context is not widely employed, but it makes sense to do so. Essentially, the screens are catalysts for committing to purchases, and one image could sell the product, so why not make the process that much easier? It should be noted, however, that a balance does exist between inspiring purchases and pushing them. This balance should be thoughtfully considered throughout the creation of the marketplace.
Many products have configurable details, such as color, size, quantity, or materials and these configuration options should be at least contained to one area of the screen. While the availability of these options can seem distracting or serve to clutter the interface, they also precipitate an opportunity for enhancing the user experience in a dramatic way through invoking personalization of the product. This opportunity for the user to make the purchase their own and emotionally invest in their purchasing decision can lead to customer loyalty and retention. In this simple container of options, the interface is asking the user in a direct and very detailed way how would they like this product- it is a personal question and implies company dedication to the user; a durable and enduring bond can be created at this point. Any data about the user’s lifestyle or previous buying habits can help pre-populate some of these details and this extra effort again supports the user’s belief in a marketplace that understands and cares about the customer.
Openness and honesty are principles that should be applied throughout the marketplace design, and the product’s configuration is an opportunity to demonstrate this volition. For example, demonstrate to the user how different configurations alter the base price of the product. This should mean automatic updates to a displayed price, but a broken out itemized list is also a favorable moment to re-emphasize how the enhanced configuration usurps the base model or price. This can be done for example by showing how many other users made these choices or through the display of a review snippet specific to the options in question. These are easy methods for capitalizing on the human desire to be part of a group, to trust others, and to potentially influence future shoppers.
A note on the use of type in the product detail context:
Given the potential for various headers, sections, and containers, a need arises to emphasize and de-emphasize specific areas for the user to focus on. If the difference between a header like ‘System requirements’ and its supporting information is too great, the user becomes distracted. Through the principle of contrast that differences visually come forward and likenesses recede, the contrast of the type on the screen trumps the preferable contrast of the ‘buy’ button to the rest of the page. Then, these contrasts compete for the user’s attention and the simplicity of the purchase flow is adversely impacted.
Next up: The Shopping Cart, The Checkout Flow, The Role of Trust During Capital Transference
