Easy is Hard

Simplifying processes is hard. It requires taking stuff away. People like their stuff. How do you convince them, or yourself, to remove something?

Michael Simon from LogMeIn knows this all to well. When he developed Join.Me, their first freemium product to compete with GoToMeeting, he pushed again and again for it to be as simple as possible. When asked by his board why the interface only had 5 buttons, he replied “Because we didn’t have time to make it 4.”

One big trend in website design is reducing clicks in the purchase process. Don’t get in the way of people trying to give you money. Apply that same approach to analyzing and optimizing repetitive tasks. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Here are a few examples in process.

In Product Management:

I like to quote the wisdom of Ludacris, when he addressed designing user flows. “Move Bitch, Get Out the Way.”

Wait. What? How exactly does this apply? Allow me. You build a tool that does a thing. Your customer is trying to do the thing. Your tool should make that as easy as possible. Get out of your customer’s way, so they can do that thing.

OK, that’s really easy to say. How do you make this happen? Very few apps out there only do one thing. Adding new features is sexier than removing steps in existing flows. But, there’s beauty in both. There are always new features to build. You want your app to grow and be more useful. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. There’s pressure from every side to add and fix things, and resources are always finite. So how do you start getting out of their way?

User Testing. Examine how people use your tools, and look for the patterns. What are the most common tasks? Target repetition for optimizing first so you have the most impact. Identify the frequency of various tasks, look for ways to simplify those tasks in that order. Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts provide a perfect example.

Replying to an email is an action we repeat all the time. It also requires several steps. You’re reading along, and want to reply, hit “R” and you’re in compose mode. (Shift-R replies all.) Type your message, and when you’re ready to send, hit “Tab, enter.” You don’t even have to take your hand off the keyboard to move the mouse. After typing the message, the tab key takes you first to the send button. Sending an email after typing it is the most common action. What about your other options? Here gmail goes several steps further. Keep pressing tab, and you get the functions for CC, BCC, attaching files, expanded attaching menu, and delete. Those actions descend in order of frequency of use. You can bet that someone did a lot of number crunching to pick that exact order. Analyzing how people accomplish their tasks, and identifying ways to simplify those tasks, takes keen insight and a great deal of thought.

Online retailers worked for years to refine the buying process. Some sites today still frustrate their potential customers. The winners in E-commerce get out of the way of people giving them money. Simplifying the human side of the buying process requires incredible sophistication on the software side. Amazon famously nailed this with the “Buy now with 1 click” button.

They automated handling a huge list of things on the back end, so they could get out of the way of your purchase. Payment information, shipping addresses, billing addresses, payment confirmations, preferred shipping rate, and even the transactions are processed quickly so you don’t have to wait. All so that you can buy a thing with one click.

In Content Marketing:

Lead conversion flows in marketing should be analyzed in the same way as the other example flows. The major difference here is the goal of persuasion.

Think of the end-to-end process of a visitor coming to your site, reading a blog post, clicking on a Call-to-Action button, visiting a Landing Page, converting, and thus becoming a lead. This time the visitors motivation differs from the e-commerce example above. You are convincing them to be interested, rather than someone who has already made up their mind to buy.

Remove confusion the way you would remove extra steps. This requires consistent messaging throughout each step of the lead conversion flow. This set of related content and pages is often referred to as a “vertical.” If you are helping video game developers find music for their games, relate each step of the conversion process to video game music.

The first piece of the vertical is a blog post about how to find the right music for an indie video game soundtrack. The post is informative, helpful and optimized for targeted keywords and phrases like video game soundtracks, and indie video game developers.

The second piece of the vertical is the Call-to-Action button at the bottom of the blog post. It keeps the same consistent messaging about music for video games. A picture of a controller, and the text about getting the right music for your game are all within the same theme. Consistency creates comfort. Reassure your visitor they are clicking on the right button. If it said “Sign up now” instead of “Find music now,” they may wonder what they are signing up for. Leave no room for confusion.

The third piece is the landing page. A landing page contains both content and a web form used for collecting information from visitors. The language on this page continues talking about hiring musicians for video game scores. The web form asks for their name and email address, the bare minimum we need to continue engaging with the visitor. Once they have submitted the form, or “converted” in marketing terms, they are directed to the page where they can post their listing.

Each step in that process reinforces the visitors original intent. Consistent messaging throughout the flow eliminates confusion. They didn’t have to learn new terms, hunt for the right button, or wonder if they are still on the right path. Simplifying the conversion path leads to higher conversion rates, and happier visitors.

In Customer Support:

Managers always want to make reporting easier. Easier reporting sounds great, right? Make sure you don’t do that at the expense of your team. Take this example: You want to know one more piece of data about customer support cases. So, you add just one more drop-down menu on the case layout. This adds another 2 seconds to the time it takes to close that case. 2 seconds isn’t much, right? Do the math. With a team of 15 reps, handling 30 cases a day, that works out to:

15 Reps * 30 cases per day * 21 work days per month =
18,900 seconds, 315 minutes, or 5.25 extra hours per month.

Adding one more step just added 5.25 hours of work, every month, for your team. — How long does it take you to build that report?

How do you collect the data without breaking their workflow?

In SAAS companies, customer support can identify problem trends before most other departments. To identify them, you need to categorize and quantify the tickets. Create a new drop-down menu with a list of categories. Start with your best guess of the possible sources, and try to cover everything. Resist the temptation to add an “other” field. That bucket will get filled with all kinds of junk. Your fields should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. In other words, cover everything with no dupes. If someone has to think about which category a ticket should be in, their options aren’t clear enough. Establishing these fields is only the first step.
Step two: Look at the data you collected. It should tell you many things. For now, let’s stick with simplifying processes. Reorder the items in the drop-down menu, so the most commonly used one is at the top. Just like the Gmail example above, you’re making small changes to improve repetitive tasks. Re-visit these orders from time to time as products change, and new trends emerge.

Workflow management is not about hitting a home run every once in a while. Targeting repeated actions amplifies the results of small changes. Consistently hitting singles can drive a lot more runs home.

Who knew simplicity could be so complicated?

Need help with your lead flows or customer workflows? I can help.