£5k budget. £1m extra in the first month.
Post-Olympics London, 2012. The London Eye had enjoyed a wave of global publicity, visitor numbers were up, and they had a website where people could buy tickets in advance. There was just one problem: people were visiting the website. They just weren't buying from it.
The problem
People were browsing. Not buying. And queuing instead.
With a bit of budget left at the end of the financial year, the question was: what would £5k get them? The answer started, as it always does, with understanding what was actually going on. Not just the numbers, which show you patterns, but the reasons behind them, which require talking to real people.
The data told an interesting story. Italians were drawn to the Cupids capsule. The French gravitated towards the canapé capsule. Germans headed straight for the queue-jumping service. Different audiences, different motivations, all completely legible in the data.
The research, conducted with people in and around Sheffield (Londoners aren't really tourists in their own city), was rather more direct about what wasn't working:
"What are all these tickets? Why do none of them make any sense? Why does every page feel like War and Peace but doesn't actually tell me why I should pick one ticket over another? How many clicks?"
The ticket names couldn't be touched. The ecommerce platform couldn't be touched. So the structure had to do all the work.
The work
A trick borrowed from restaurant menus. Applied to ticket structure.
Restaurant menus are structured using a combination of information architecture and behavioural economics. The same principles apply to any catalogue where you want people to find the right thing and feel confident choosing it. The tickets were sorted into an implicit and explicit structure: basic tickets with no add-ons, tickets with add-ons, capsule bookings. Organised by category, not by whatever order they happened to be in.
Then the tickets were ordered lowest to highest price. Which sounds obvious until you learn that the cheapest ticket had been sitting second in the list. People were buying it because it was easy to find, not because it was the right choice for them. Moving it to first meant people could see it, feel confident they weren't missing something cheaper, and then consider whether the next option up was worth the extra.
The content got a tidy too. A page removed, and the structure reworked so the further you went, the more you learned, rather than reading the same thing repeated at every level.
That £3 difference in basket spend netted an extra £1m in sales in the first month after launch.
Over the following twelve months, the extra £3 per person translated into a 33% increase in overall sales. And fewer people queuing at the attraction itself, which meant fewer complaints.
Sound familiar?
People are visiting. But they're not buying.
If the structure of your catalogue is working against the people trying to use it, no amount of traffic will fix the conversion problem. The diagnostic will tell you where the friction is and what it's worth sorting out.
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