Salesforce, you're not there yet!

What does the perfect CRM for your company look like?  At FindWAtt, we chose Salesforce because it makes the most use of attributes, and is the most customizable.  On the surface, Salesforce seems like the perfect tool for a company as attribute-crazy as we are.  We can create our own custom attributes and values (albeit with some limitations), use formulas to derive values, and create a series of rules to assign tasks to the appropriate person.

The problem is that while conceptually solid, the usability suffers from what seems to be an insufficient amount of structure. Each entity in Salesforce, whether it is Leads, Contacts, Opportunities or Accounts, has their own unique set of fields. I can create a new field for a Lead, but when that Lead is converted into an Opportunity, that new field does not go with it.  To make that happen, I have to dig into the settings, recreate the attribute (under Opportunities this time, instead of Leads) and then specify how those values should map.

Email to Salesforce is another feature that seems very useful, but  falls short of its potential.  Any email sent to a Lead (or Contact) can be Bcc'd to Salesforce and logged under that person’s record. This is very handy for organizing all of your correspondence.  Unfortunately, Salesforce can only match based on ONE of the recipient’s email addresses. If your lead or contact uses more than one email address, you’re out of luck! I know it sounds crazy that someone might actually have more than one email address, but allowing multiple values for any attribute (known as multiple cardinality) is a fundamental thing.

In my dreams I have the option of allowing multiple cardinality for any attribute, and the ability to add any custom field to any entity with the simple click of a button—but Salesforce has yet to make my dreams come true.

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Findability Find of the Week, a blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the “Guided Search” feature on CompUSA.com. Although this Guided Search is not available in all categories, it greatly improves the shopping experience for products where it is available. To fully understand the effects of this feature, we’ll examine the “before” and “after” options in laptops.

Before: “Subcategory” choices are mixed and confusing

Subcategories address a variety of attributes, from screen size to operating system, in one list. The list is difficult to understand quickly, and forces the customer to read each option carefully.

After: Choices are grouped into clear and logical Attributes

Subcategories have been replaced with a series of filters which are grouped under meaningful headers. The customer can quickly read each section header and determine whether or not he wants to make a choice from that section.

Before: Customers can choose only one “Subcategory”, with unpredictable results

Although these subcategories address a variety of attributes, the customer is limited to picking only one. What if he’s looking for a laptop with a 64 bit OS and a 17” screen? Too bad! Choosing “64bit OS” or “17” and Above Screen” returns 5+ pages of results and no further options for narrowing them down except “New” vs. “Refurbished”.

After: Customers can make choices for each Attribute

After choosing 17”-20.1” from the “Screen Size” Attribute, the Customer is then allowed to choose an Operating System (or various other Attributes).

Before: Number of Results doesn’t add up

The Subcategory “Desktop Replacement” claims to contain 14 products.

But clicking on it returns 16, of which 12 are “New”, 2 are “Refurbished”, and 2 are not accounted for.

After: Number of results adds up and is updated based on choices

“Desktop Replacement” says it contains 15 products, and actually returns 15 products when clicked.

After clicking on “Desktop Replacement”, the remaining filters are updated to show that 10 of these are “New”, 4 are “Refurbished”, and 1 is “Open Box”—all are accounted for.

Although CompUSA’s new “Guided Search” feature is not perfect (for instance, not all numbers of results add up correctly, indicating that some products are missing attributes), it is miles better than the “classic view” with no attributes. Products are much more findable in the new version, and customers have much more information available to them when making decisions, as well as the chance to decide what is important to them on an individual basis.

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Findability Find of the Week, a new blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the “Highlight Differences” Feature on BestBuy.com.

Here at FindWAtt, we believe that findability encompasses not only the ability to locate the product you’re looking for, but also having the necessary information to make a purchase decision. Although this information is frequently buried within the product details for a particular item, some retailers understand the importance of having it in a usable format. The ability to compare products is becoming more and more common when shopping online.

However, too many retailers allow customers to view products side by side, but stop there, forcing customers to pick through all available data to figure out the difference between two or more products.

BestBuy.com has gone a step further and introduced a feature called “Highlight Differences.” To use this feature, a customer chooses two or three products to compare, then clicks the appropriate button, and Best Buy shades the product attributes that differ. For example, in the two cameras pictured, one has 3x Optical Zoom, and the other has 20x, so the line for the Optical Zoom attribute is shaded in blue.

This display makes it far easier for the customer to scan the list of attributes and easily identify the relevant differences between two or more products, thereby leading more quickly and easily to a purchase decision. The feature isn’t perfect (for example, some attributes which actually mean the same thing are expressed differently, and are therefore highlighted as differences) but it is a huge step in the right direction.

What do you think of this feature? Have you seen it in use anywhere other than BestBuy.com?

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week, a blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the Laptop Bag Finder on eBags .

Finding a case to fit your laptop can be complicated. Any site with good faceted navigation will let you choose the material, color, and brand that you’re looking for, but how do you ensure that your laptop will fit in the case you’ve chosen?

Some retailers don’t include sizing information in the faceted navigation, forcing you to delve into the details of any bag you may be considering.

Others allow you to choose by screen size, but don’t inspire confidence with phrases like “max laptop screen size” and “fits most screen sizes”.

EBags, however, has a quick and easy solution to this problem with their Laptop Bag Finder.

One click opens the simple panel where you can choose the brand of your laptop from a dropdown and view a list of models. Selecting the appropriate model is easy—just click through the alphabetical list or start typing the model name or number in the search box and the list will be filtered in real time.

If you don’t know the model of your laptop or it’s not on the list, you also have the option of entering its measurements instead.

Either option neatly filters the available list of products to only those that will fit your laptop, leaving you to browse by color, material, brand, etc. without worrying about size.

This principle could easily be applied to other product categories. Shopping for shoes? Why click on your size every time you change categories--why not enter your size at the beginning of your shopping experience or have the option of entering your foot measurements only once? The possibilities are endless. We’d love to hear your ideas!

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week, a blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the color family filter on Endless.com.

Endless sells shoes, bags, and other accessories, and like most other online shoe retailers, they have the typical filters: Category, Brand, Size, Width, and Heel Height. Where Endless really shines, however, is in their Color Family filter.

Because there is such a wide variety of colors (especially in apparel), using it as a filter can present some challenges.  One common tactic is presenting all color names with no normalization. This leads to too many options requiring too much work on the part of the customer.

For example, here is the color filter from another online retailer who sells shoes. In order to view all blue shoes, the customer has to click Blue, Denim, Light Blue, Navy, and Turquoise! This means ten clicks to view all blue shoes (since the customer has to click to clear the selection each time in order to get back to this list.)

Endless has an elegant and intuitive solution to this problem: rather than displaying dozens of color names, they represent color with swatches, which the customer can then click on to see products in that color.

For example, clicking on the blue square returns the following products (and many more), despite the fact that the “official” colors for these products are Turquoise, Jetblue Quasar, Teal, Navy, and Onyx.

The solution Endless has implemented is well suited to customers’ needs. Color is a very visual attribute, and presenting a visual representation of color that doesn’t require reading an entire list is both intuitive and efficient. The word list of colors above contains only 50% more values than the swatch list from Endless, but takes far more time to process and allow the customer to reach a decision.

Which interface do you prefer? Have you seen this tactic used by other retailers? How could a similar idea be applied beyond just color?

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Findability Find of the Week, a new blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the Faceted Navigation of 3Balls.com. 3Balls has done an excellent job managing the attributes of their products and presenting them in a way that is useful to the customer. The navigation of this site has many advantages over other sites we’ve seen, but for today we’re going to focus on two main points that have a huge impact on findability.

1) Thorough Attributes – Unlike sites that only allow filtering by Brand, Price, and/or Size, 3Balls has anywhere between four and twelve attributes per product category. I’m no golf expert (I can’t guarantee that they aren’t missing any relevant attributes!) but the available filters make it very easy to narrow down the results to a manageable number and find just the right product.

Example from 3Balls.com—the Wedges category contains 12 filters!

2) Well-Populated Attribute Values – One problem often found on sites with faceted navigation is insufficient population of attributes. A product filter that allows the customer to choose between “A” and “B” doesn’t function well when some “A” products are missing the attribute value “A”.

This is not a problem with 3Balls, as all products appear to have the appropriate attributes. For example, within 734 Wedges, the “By Hand” attribute shows 137 for Left Hand and 597 for Right Hand. These numbers correctly add up to the total number of 734 products, indicating that each product has been populated with either “Left Hand” or “Right Hand”.

Together, these two features make it easy for a customer to quickly and easily find exactly the product he is looking for, and to feel more confident in making a purchase because he can be certain that he has seen everything that meets his criteria. A shopping experience like this is almost enough to make me want to take up golf!

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Findability Find of the Week, a new blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the Brand Filter on BabyAge.com.  BabyAge has implemented a great solution to the classic issue of how many facets too display.

Their brand filter contains a list of brands with checkboxes, allowing the customer to choose brands by clicking if they see what they want. However, if the customer wishes to avoid scrolling through pages of brands, there is a text box which filters the list of options when text is entered. For example, if a customer knows that the brand they want contains the word “baby” but cannot remember the exact name, they need only type in “baby” to get a filtered list.

This solution is well suited to customers’ needs—those who want a specific brand can easily zero in on it, those who don’t care about brand can easily skip the filter altogether (without having to scroll too far, as the large list of brands is nicely contained) and those who want to see all brands can scroll within the box to view the whole list.

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!

Have you ever had difficulty choosing a product when shopping online? Too many websites provide a large list of products and leave you with very few options for narrowing it down and no guidance at all as to what you should choose. To combat this problem, Easy2 Technologies has come up with their Product Selector, which claims to “help your customers find the right product to purchase, based on their unique needs and preferences.” But how well does it work? To find out, I used the demos on their site (http://www.easy2.com/site2009/productSelectors.aspx) to choose a sewing machine and a light bulb.

How to Use the Product Selector

The Product Selector consists of two main sections:

1) A list of questions to answer

2) The list of products that fit the answers to those questions

Operation is simple. Just answer the questions of your choice, and watch the list of products refine by your specifications. Answering a few questions quickly brings you to a manageable list of products to choose from.

The Pros

• All Optional Questions - You can answer the questions of your choice, in the order of your choice. Skipping questions is easy and intuitive.
• Multiple Choice Answers - Some questions allow multiple choices, so you’re not locked into only one answer.

• Real-Time Filtering - The list of products is filtered in real time as you answer each question, so you can easily see the results of your choices and re-evaluate if no results are found. (This is in stark contrast to some other sites, where you make a series of choices and then press “go”, only to get no products and no clues as to which combination of choices led to this result.)
• Real-Time Answer Updates - As you answer questions, the possible answers to remaining questions are updated appropriately. For Example, once you choose “serger” as the type of sewing machine, the product features that are not relevant for sergers are removed from the options for “What other features are important to you in a sewing machine?”

The Cons

• Missing Multiple Choice Answers - Some questions that should allow multiple answers do not. For example, “What is your price range?” allows only one choice, so if your actual price range doesn’t fit into their predetermined buckets, you’ll have to go through the selection process more than once.

• No Visual Breadcrumbs - When answering each question, you cannot see the answers you have given for other questions (although there is an indication of which questions have been answered).

• No Real-Time Question Updates - Questions are displayed after they become irrelevant. For example, after choosing “serger” for type of machine, the question “For making buttonholes, which do you prefer?” is still shown, despite the fact that none of the answers can be chosen, since sergers do not make buttonholes.

• No Help for Making Choices - No guidance is given on what choices you should make, so you must have domain specific knowledge or know exactly what you are looking for. For example, one of the questions for choosing a sewing machine asks about “special presser feet”, but does not explain what any of them do or why you would want one.

• Missing Questions - Some relevant questions are missing. For example, when choosing a lightbulb, there is no question about base type, so you can’t look at all bulbs for ceiling fans, appliances, etc.

• No Indication of Number of Results – There is no indication of how many results will be returned based on the answer to any question. This number is useful for guiding your choices, as you may choose not to click on an answer that will return too few results.

Conclusion

The Product Selector performs well in quickly narrowing down a long list of products, assuming you already know something about the category and what you’re looking for in particular. By answering 4 questions, I was able to narrow down a list of sewing machines from 39 to 5, making it much easier to compare them and make a choice.

Where it falls short is in offering a truly guided experience—it gives you options in the form of questions, but never provides information about what these options mean or why you should choose one over another.

The typical faceted navigation experience is one where the user is selecting product attributes. In this case, Easy 2 Technologies has transformed difficult-to-understand attributes into clear questions about user benefit; so instead of asking for 100W vs. 400W, they ask Regular Light or Brisk Light. This is an indicator of how people will shop online in the future, and despite a few shortcomings, Easy2 Technologies has a winner.