Meet Diane, a Senior Digital Marketing Director at a large international ecommerce company. She’s trying to plan her family’s summer vacation. Exhausted from a day full of meetings, she hopes to wrap things up in an hour, and decides to tackle airfare first.

Diane and family are interested in three different destinations, and are debating between the last week of June and first week of July. In order to compare their options, she opens three different browser windows for her three possible destinations, and changes dates in each, trying to assess options in an organized manner.

Because even the fastest booking site she knows is slow, while its search engine is grinding away, Diane decides to use the time to buy beachwear for her boys. She searches a kids’ clothing site for red pants for boys, and gets this:

Frustrated, she resorts to Amazon, repeating her search for red boys pants. The two first rows of results include Essential Slim Fit Chino Pants for adult men—none of which are red—and something called “Trailside Supply Co. Big Boys’ Convertible Quick-Dry Nylon Trail Pant With Zip-O! Short”—in light brown. Even though results are not as relevant as she would have liked, Diane is used to Amazon—and since she needs a few other things for the house, she completes the purchase there.

Diane returns to her travel site. Somehow, several new windows of different sites have popped up, slowing her computer down. Her search engine of choice returned results with red eye flights (which she hates), and forgot her preference for arrival times before 6 pm.

At this point, tired and irritated, Diane goes back to her work email so she can hit the ground running the following morning. All the while, gnawing at her is her unfinished vacation planning and a fear of rising airfare and hotel rates.

The future of digital experiences

Diane’s plight illustrates just how far software interactions still are from being truly useful, let alone enjoyable, rewarding or meaningful.

What did Diane want? For starters, her interaction with travel and retail websites should have been functional, satisfying her exact need of buying airplane tickets and kids’ clothing without a hitch.

As she was typing in her query, the software should have offered an auto-complete UI, reacting to every keystroke with relevant options and shortening the time to the right results.

Search results should have been personalized to her previous purchases, and had she chosen to search in another language, just as efficient and relevant.

Imagine if Diane had walked up to her screen which had just lit up on its own, recognizing her from afar. As she tells the laptop what she wants to accomplish, her favorite booking engine is already presenting her with personalized results: her favorite airlines, times of day, seating preferences, naturally included.

When Diane says she wants red pants for boys, relevant models are presented to her in a way she prefers.

She will see results based on the season and in her kids’ sizes, in a carousel of fashion-forward videos or images, or via an inspirational content experience combined with her travel destination. There’ll be a virtual fitting room with her kids’ exact body measurements preloaded, and easy additional options for herself to explore.

The possibilities are endless (and many that will be in place in ten years are unimaginable today), but the idea is the same: to compete in the future, software will have to provide interactions that are not just frictionless, but rewarding and meaningful. Let’s dissect this through a few key concepts, illustrating how to start envisioning the future of ecommerce through such meaningful software interactions.

User engagement: at the intersection of customer service and software engineering

Let’s start with the daily battleground for your e-commerce KPIs. What keeps shoppers on your site, and keeps them returning for more? It’s no secret that well-engineered and highly functional websites are critical to user engagement. The negative, frustrating part of Diane’s experience had a lot to do with site performance and all the front- and back-end engineering elements that go into it. But, there is more to it.

As functional (engineering and user interface) problems are solved, what then will be the new battleground for the discerning consumer’s attention?

Your website is as much the lifeblood of your business as the shop window and the store itself.

Every part of the customer experience—from the design of the storefront to the first greeting, from accommodating shoppers “just looking” to responding to specific inquiries with purpose and precision, from checkout to wrapping the product—leaves a lasting impression.

The customer service principle is the same on and offline: it means making sure that every aspect of your visitors’ experience is overwhelmingly positive. For this to happen, engineering and user experience must work hand in hand.

“Experience: note the word. Engineers tend not to like it; it’s too subjective. But when I ask them about their favorite automobile or test equipment, they will smile delightedly as they discuss the fit and the finish, the sensation of power during acceleration, their ease of control while shifting or steering, or the wonderful feel of the knobs and switches on the instrument. Those are experiences.”

Donald Norman, “Design of Everyday Things”

Architecting the future of digital businesses

Visionary leaders and businesses understand that the competitive horizon is shortening. Staying ahead of advanced technology may have been a part of a ten- or twenty-year plan; today, not having a user experience vision (particularly as part of a software implementation plan) presents a far more imminent danger. With that said...where to begin? On the one hand, the competitive landscape and the battleground for budgets in today’s ecommerce is still about today’s software. In addition, time is our highest commodity, as both business and career planning are monopolized by quarterly, or at best yearly visions. Thankfully, there is a simple assessment model for your business’s digital experience: one that will allow you to stay ahead in today’s competitive playground, while crafting a skeleton of your digital future.

A simple model for meaningful evaluation and vision planning

Forrester Research presented a maturity model some time ago that is still helpful in guiding ecommerce businesses as they “evaluate preparedness to drive digital transactions:”

The Three Tiers Of Digital Maturity (Forrester Research)

• Digital beginner: disrupt experiences. As executives start out on the digital journey, they often identify quick hits — the digital low-hanging fruit. They focus on establishing new digital capabilities as part of the existing business; investments to improve customer experiences and operational efficiency dominate the digital portfolio. Digital initiatives in early-stage companies are most often driven by a C-level executive below the CEO.
• Digital intermediate: disrupt businesses. Intermediate companies must transform from a pre-digital to a post-digital era. These companies fundamentally shift their business model as they learn to harness digital capabilities to improve customer outcomes. But leaders in these companies still have obstacles to overcome, especially when it comes to changing their culture. The CEO must be on board to truly move digital at this level.
• Digital advanced: disrupt markets. Advanced companies push the boundaries of the possible to find new ways to deliver customer value and create new revenue models. Advanced companies are natural business predators, buying startups with bright ideas and weaker competitors. The CEO is squarely behind digital at this level.

The findings include a set of recommendations and best practices, but our focus here is on the practical model for user experiences.

Forrester’s UX review methodology spans five fundamentals of user experiences, arguing that expert reviewers should evaluate:

1. Search and navigation
2. Content
3. Progress and workflow
4. Error avoidance and recovery
5. Privacy and trust

The ranking for search and navigation is not a surprise, considering that 43% of site visitors immediately go to search boxes, and that site searchers are 200% more likely to convert. With this in mind, in order to illustrate a concrete application of the digital maturity model, we’ll walk you through our own maturity model for search and navigation.

Algolia search and discovery maturity model

Let’s get back to our friend Diane. Her experience with software—today’s, tomorrow’s, and aspirational—fits well with how Nielsen Norman group explains the progression:

“The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features.”

Diane was looking to complete a couple of transactions with ease. At this stage of search software digital maturity, a functional search box that lets her find what she is looking for is all that’s needed. Her relationship with the software is purely transactional: a comparison with TaskRabbit, a company providing one-time household errands and repairs, is adequate. With TaskRabbit, the customer asks for and completes one transaction at a time. There are no multiple paths to enhancing or expanding the experience; and while the business model may rely on repeat customers, the majority of the customer experience is rooted in that one transaction.

At the time when Diane is enjoying a personalized experience—the one where she gets to both find and discover possibilities based on her preferences—it is useful to make a distinction between search and search technology.

Search is what we think of in the narrow sense: a transactional bar or a box, limiting the user experience to a specific find. Advanced discovery experiences go beyond the box: search technology powers both search and discovery, and the user interface includes browsing, navigation, and advanced faceting capabilities. The search bar may or may not be used at all. Here, we can think of the relationship between the user and the software as consultative. Throughout the duration of her project, Diane has a skilled consultant who knows her well, can think a step ahead of her, and helps her navigate complete projects that mirror the complexity of her online world.

“In business, there are three levels of empathy. The first is ‘on demand’ empathy, which is the ability to sense what customers want. The second is ‘solution’ empathy, which entails understanding a customer’s problem and figuring out how to address it. The third is ‘transcendent’ empathy where you create solutions to problems that customers don’t even know that they have.”

Geoffrey James

What could come after the “beyond the box” experience?

It is when search technology becomes transcendent—not only fixing and predicting user needs, but inspiring them—that it goes to the next maturity level. User intent is often met without them having to do anything at all: search without the box. Key ecommerce strategies like omnichannel improvements and personalization can rely on advanced UIs such as voice and chatbots. This makes search technologies that have been at the forefront of natural language processing a natural fit.

• Disrupt experiences: “Digital low-hanging fruit” are best-in-class search-in-the-box tools that provide results from the first keystroke at the speed that’s perceived by users as instant, as well as typo-tolerance, textual and business relevance, and cross-platform and online capabilities.
• Disrupt businesses: Search beyond the box empowers users with browsing and navigation options that mean a faster path to the shopping cart or content they need, thus indeed “harnessing digital experiences to improve customer outcomes.”
• Disrupt markets: Advanced companies “push the boundaries of” what’s possible to deliver customer value and new revenue models, thinking literally and metaphorically outside the box, and using search without the box for long-term partnerships with users who want highly customized and seamless experiences across multiple form factors, including voice.

This progression of search and discovery naturally includes Forrester’s third fundamental of UX: progress and workflow. Where great search in the box is a fairly isolated website element, search beyond and without the box accelerates progress towards the desired outcome of both the user and the business — for example, seamless navigation or voice order fulfillment for the user, and increased average order value or increased time on site for the business.

Conclusion

Ecommerce has been facing a turbulent pace of change: from the competitive landscape, to customer needs and wants, to software technologies advancing at a dizzying speed. Such a dynamic environment requires strategy more than ever, yet leaves very little time to anchor or adjust it timely.

Using a simple maturity model can help. From understanding the three tiers of digital maturity: disrupting experiences, disrupting businesses, then disrupting markets, to seeing a practical application in ecommerce site search software, we hope to have illuminated a path forward.

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