Making Joining Easy: Case of an Entertainment Club Website Abstract The goal of this project was to design a site that would make the online process of joining the Columbia House Music or DVD club faster and easier. Faced with low conversion rates from online advertising, our challenge was to quickly solve the main problems with the existing join process, which were identified through user testing and site data logs. In response we designed a separate mini-site that reduced the entire process to 3 steps (and as many pages). The Club-based ecommerce experience is unique: the number of products a user selects is fixed, allowing us to implement a unique and transparent interaction model for the shopping cart design. The project was extremely successful. Conversion rates increased 180%. The design work for this project then set direction for subsequent visual and interface design projects for Columbiahouse.com. Keywords Interaction design, Marketing, Shopping cart, Check-out process, music club, Registration process, Joining club, Performance metrics, Usability testing, User experience, User interface, User research, User testing, Visual design, Visual systems, Website Dena Fletcher Director, User Interface Columbia House 1221 6th Ave. 17th fl. New York, NY 10020 [email protected] Annette Brookman Senior Graphic Designer Columbia House 1221 6th Ave. 17th fl. New York, NY 10020 [email protected] Permission to make digital or print copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage; the copyright notice, the full citation of the publication, and its date appear; and notice is given that copying is by permission of AIGA. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. This material is co-published with permission in the Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library.©2002 American Institute of Graphic ArtsExperience Design Case Study Archive2 Industry/category Ecommerce, entertainment, direct marketing, music club, clubs, website Project statement The Columbia House Company is the world's largest direct marketer of music, videos and DVDs. Columbia House was established in 1955 and currently has more than 14 million offline and online members. The Columbia House Website (www.columbiahouse.com) was first launched in 1996. Columbia House is club based. Users join by participating in an initial offering that includes a fixed number of products. Members then interact with Columbia House in much the same way they would with other retailers, purchasing one or more items at a time and take advantage of special offers. The primary goal of this project was to make the online process of joining the Music and DVD clubs faster and easier and by so doing increase enrollments in the clubs. This project was initiated because of the very poor conversion rates for users visiting the main Columbia House site (www.columbiahouse.com) (prior to the redesign) from online banner advertisements. While the click-through rates for the banner ads were quite good, conversion rates were extremely low. That is to say, few who visited the site ultimately joined the clubs. Through quantitative site data and qualitative results of usability testing, we attributed the low conversion to the following: 1. Slow loading pages. Prior to the redesign (launched September 2001) the Columbia House site had graphic-heavy pages, which not only added significantly to file sizes but distracted from the primary purpose of the site which is to display product (i.e. CDs and DVDs) (see figure 1). 2. Unclear join process. The process required users to first make their selections, and then complete a form. Users did not immediately understand that they were to select product prior to “signing up”. 3. Too much choice. While Columbia House prides itself on having an extensive product catalog, users confronted with so many choices were often overwhelmed and distracted by them. More, evidently, is not always better. 4. Lengthy and cumbersome checkout process. Prior to redesign, the checkout process on columbiahouse.com extended over five separate pages, consisting of upwards of two dozen steps or entry fields. 5. Insufficient feedback. Because the text line at the top of pages that displayed how many products were currently in the cart was so small, users were not always immediately aware that the product they had selected had been added to the cart. The result: users selecting the same product again and again. It was evident that columbiahouse.com needed significant improvement. However, given that the need to improve conversion rates was immediate, the team decided to develop a small separate site focused entirely on the join process. The Online Marketing group initiated the project that was then undertaken by the New Product Development group with significant support from the IT organization. Specifically, the goals of the new site, or sitelet, were:3 • Create a simple interface that enables users to quickly select multiple products with minimum page navigation and interaction • Simplify the selection process • Highlight the order of tasks • Streamline the checkout process • Design and develop lightweight pages that load within 10 seconds at slower download speeds (ideally, page source and graphics will total no more than 100K in size compared to the original join pages which are ~190K) • Double conversion rates • Design, build, and launch in one month Project participants Joe Bilman (Director, New Product Development) Dan Boyle (Development Lead) David Braun (Director, Internet Development) Annette Brookman (Senior Graphic Designer) Tony Castile (Product Manager) Dena Fletcher (Director, User Interface) Ilene Kennedy (Director, Online Product Research) Melinda Letzig (HTML Developer) Evan Schwartz (VP, New Product Development) Project dates and duration This was an extremely fast-paced project. The user interface and design work was completed in just 2 weeks. From concept to launch the entire project took 20 days. The site launched on March 2nd 2001 as www.chcd.com (the music club), and www.chdvd.com (the DVD club). Design and development process The whole team worked together to define the business problem and identify the project goals (described in the project statement). User Interface and