Conjoint analysis and similar methods are excellent ways to model consumer choice processes and to support scenario planning by answering “what if” questions. Typically, the predictive validity of conjoint analysis study is high and the experimental nature delivers great freedom, turning it into a widely accepted market standard. However, rightful questions are asked about the external validity – the ability to describe actual consumer choice behavior – and the richness of information – does it deliver information the brand can really act upon? Choice modeling approaches can bear resemblance to online purchase environments, although there are key differences. The way we design the online environment and optimize the customer experience impacts what customers choose and how they make their choices. The premise is that the interaction design of an exercise impacts the way people take the exercise, form their opinions thus the outcome of the exercise; the preferences formed. Interaction design is aimed at impacting the experience of the exercise at hand, evoking a positive emotional response toward the exercise, thereby driving the quality and accuracy of the outcomes of the exercise. Gerard and Willem took the audience through an overview of interaction design principles in designing choice processes. Translating these fundamentals to conjoint analysis and online sales environments, they shared hypotheses and tested examples of the impact of different visual designs on consumer choices. Find out more at http://www.skimgroup.com/iiex-na-2014.

1. This presentation was delivered by Gerard Loosschilder, Chief
Innovation Officer and Willem Buijs, Interaction Designer, at
the Insight Innovation Exchange conference in the Georgia
Tech conference center in Atlanta (GA, USA) on 18 June
2014.
The presentation taps into insights extracted from SKIM’s E-
Tailor program, which combines insights from choice modeling
and interaction design to help drive the conversion and
satisfaction rates of online retail.
1

2. Interaction design addresses how a product or service is
presented to users and how that presentation makes people
feel and act. It is about improving the end-users interactions
with the service, shifting from being product-centered to being
user-centered. In online retail, interaction design focuses on
what shoppers experience and how they feel supported to find
what they really want.
Interaction designers focus first on the user’s desired
experiences, serving as the starting point for the design
process to provide a better user experience overall. From
there, the challenge is to take the desired experiences and
translate them into effective environmental design parameters.
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3. To explain how we may go about, we present the story of
Daniel, the owner of a downtown computer hardware store.
Over the years, Daniel has been very successful at selling
computers; desktops, laptops and more recently, tablets.
The secret to his success was a deep understanding of the
customer and her needs, and his ability to adapt the sales
conversation to the needs and profile of the customer.
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4. When a customer enters his store, Daniel quickly categorizes
the type against a set of personas in his head, and he quickly
confirms the type by asking a few questions. Based on this,
Daniel decides a sales strategy, taking the customer to a part
of the store where he pegs that the customer would find the
product of his or her choice.
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5. Daniel has laid out his store in a way that it is fully supportive
of his sales strategies and tactics. Instead of cramming his
store full of computers, Daniel has a selection to capture the
variety of personas and needs that he expected to get in his
store. Once Daniel has pegged the customer as one of a
certain kind, he takes them to the corresponding section of the
store and helps the customer make a choice among the
options laid out.
His focus is to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty,
ensuring that customers feel good about their choices and
increasing the likelihood that they come back for future
purchases.
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6. Daniel fine-tuned his sales skill over time. This way of working
has worked out really well for him. Daniel’s business has
grown over the years, he makes good money and he has built
a loyal customer base.
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7. However recently, the tide has turned. For the first time in
years, sales are down. His customer base seems not any less
loyal in that they keep frequenting his store, but it happens
more and more often that they leave the store without a
purchase.
Upon enquiring, Daniel found out that they would collect his
advice but close the purchase online, at a price that he would
never be able to beat.
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8. Daniel found out that his experience was in line with the
industry trend of sales shifting from offline to online stores.
Daniel’s suspicions were confirmed by his research. Daniel
read in an industry report by the US Census Bureau and
referred to by Jeff Jordan’s blog that the direct web sales of
computers went from 3% to 18% over the last 10 years.
If we assume that people have not suddenly started to buy
more computers, it was sales lost for stores like Daniel’s.
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9. The writing was on the wall and it was time to act. Indeed,
Daniel found out that others were selling products at prices he
was not able to beat, and these stores also offered the
opportunity of conveniently delivering the product to the
customer’s home.
Daniel started to look into the opportunity of opening his own
online retail channel. However, he did not like the designs of
competitor stores. To do it better, he started working with an
interaction designer.
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10. Based on his experience in his actual store, he knew that
effective sales are all about effectively gauging the client’s
profile, needs and preferences. He considered it would be
perfect if he could translate his knowledge of the sales
process in a traditional store to his new web store and give
shoppers a better experience than they were able to find in the
online stores that he saw today.
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11. 11
So instead of just dumping zillions of products online and
installing a few filters to help customers weed through them …

12. … he attempted to deliver the same kind of experience that
customers experienced visiting his downtown store; the focus
on understanding who they are, their needs and preferences,
and come up with tailored advice that would make his
customers happy.
12

13. This is when interaction design comes in handy. We want to
understand how we can give customers the same type of
support and advice, and the same type of desired experience
as they would have in a physical shop, and translate this into a
web environment. Daniel started working with an Interaction
Designer to get the desired experience.
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14. Designing the desired experience can be described best by
drawing an analogy between online and offline retail. Online
retail stores selling computer equipment look most like a Best
Buy; an electronics retail chain in the United States. This chain
offers a choice from many brands and options within the
brand. Sales assistance is focused on helping customers
making a selection from the massive amount of products on
display. It is not particularly hard to translate this environment
into an online web store.
Customers flock in by the masses and browse to process as
many products as possible, reading the specs and go
purchasing their desired product. The online store would look
like most web stores these days: a large range of products to
choose from a couple of filters and a long list of specifications.
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15. How different is it in an Apple store. The purchase process is
designed to be an experience. The number of options in any
Apple product line is limited; Apple has pretty much made all
choices for you.
Also, the store is about much more than products. It is about
an experience, and it also offers other services such as
learning about using the product.
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16. The interaction design of the e-commerce environment we
have in mind is modeled more after an Apple store than a Best
Buy store.
The purpose is to design the online retail environment in such
a way that we maximize the customer’s satisfaction with the
purchase process as well as the product they end up with, at a
minimal cognitive and affective effort.
16

17. This is how we do it from an interaction design point of view.
We invented Daniel the Virtual Merchant to represent our
interaction design. This is John, our online customer. Daniel
wants to understand John and categorize him based on a
“persona” – a rudimentary customer segmentation model to
deliver a mental picture and inform the sales process.
For this purpose, Daniel asks John a few effective questions
covering the “when, what and how” of the purchase, such as:
“what’s your budget”, “what do you want the product to do for
you?” and “how do you me to ask you questions about your
needs and preferences”?
17

18. Based on this information, Daniel the Virtual Merchant pegs
John to be a tech-savvy person so he is well informed about
the possibilities of a computer and in the sales conversation …
18

19. … John would like the information to be specification-based,
informing him in a factual way about the specifications of the
computer and he can derive the benefits himself.
19

20. To address John’s needs and preference, Daniel will take
John to a part of the store where they would find the higher
end notebooks with the more premium specifications to
support John making the right choice.
20

21. In the way we present information in an online retail
environment, we tailor the information presented to John by
focusing on specifications and in the process we come up with
a computer that has the specifications of John’s choice.
21

22. It works entirely different for Eva, our next customer. Eva does
not care about specifications. She is concerned about different
things focusing on what the computer would do for her and
what the benefits are.
22

23. For example, Eva wants to know if she can use the computer
to watch movies sitting on the couch with her boyfriend.
23

24. Or she wants to know if she can use the computer for her
work just as much as for her leisure activities, indoors and
outdoors.
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25. For example, she wants to know if she can take her new
computer with her to a coffee house to work from there.
25

26. The sales conversation will focus on understanding those
needs and adapting the advice to make sure that Eva
understands the benefits of the computers of choice, instead
of “just” the specifications.
26

27. If Eva is presented with an option, Daniel the Virtual Merchant
presents the benefits instead of the specifications.
27

28. So the sales conversation of Daniel the Virtual Merchant
focuses first on understanding the customer and segmenting
them in order to serve as a basis for a rudimentary
classification in personas, taking that as a point of departure in
the sales conversation.
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29. Then we go into the sales conversation itself, in which we can
choose to learn more about the customer needs and
preferences and have that inform the sales process itself.
For example, we can use the answers to previous questions to
refine our picture of the customer and have that inform the
next questions we ask, and the product we ultimately suggest
to the customer.
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30. In order to see how this works, we created our own
playground in which we can we can experiment with ways we
take the participant on a journey to the desired product in a
more satisfying way.
Please note the similarity with A/B testing, nowadays a typical
approach to analyzing customer behavior in online stores.
The difference is that our playground is entirely experimental
and virtual and does not present a risk of losing sales.
30

31. A first building block is a replication of a common online retail
environment. We also call it an Elimination-By-Aspects or EBA
model. It consists of one big list of all products the customer
can chose from, and a set of filters to select and deselect
products.
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32. The filters are actually based on the attribute levels, so if you
select them, they will help to reduce the choice set. Once the
customer has selected the desired product, he puts it in the
shopping cart and confirms the purchase of a single product.
32

33. Elimination-By-Aspects is a choice model. There are
alternative choice models that could be equally effective than
the EBA model to arrive at the desired product. Choice-based
conjoint or CBC is another choice model. In CBC, the
customer is exposed to a number of choice tasks in which we
systematically vary the attribute levels of the products present.
We derive the customer’s tradeoffs from the choices she
makes, which helps us identify the “optimal” product or a set
of “acceptable” products. We compute the acceptable product
on the fly and identify the product in the full set that comes
closest.
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34. The set of modules in our play pen also includes a Build-Your-
Own (BYO) exercise. Like in CBC, we ask the respondent to
specify the desired product and then identify the closest
approximation in the list of available products. This is tricky
because to know which product comes closest, we need to
know the person’s tradeoffs. This can be measured by means
of CBC.
Oftentimes, we will need a combination of building blocks to
validly gauge a person’s preference. It presents the tradeoff
between collecting a valid read of the person’s preferences,
and the effort that we expect the person to put into the task.
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35. Each building block has its layers to avoid information overkill.
Beneath the top layer we have lower layers with additional
product information. The information can be anything that
would normally be available in an online web store, and more,
to learn about the effect.
We will probably experiment with the information we deliver
and the way we deliver it, systematically playing with it to
know the impact of, for example, variations in reviews,
specifications and benefit descriptions.
35

36. The current version of our playground is to sell notebook
computers. We have included various building blocks in our
experimental environment.
Our playground consists of the building blocks EBA, CBC and
BYO which we use to determine which block, or combination
of blocks, is most effective to gauge a person’s preferences at
an acceptable cognitive and affective effort.
36

37. Within every building block, we systematically play with
elements to assess their impact on customer preferences and
the preference formation process.
37

38. Here we determine the order in which filters are presented
based on the respondent’s profile. If the customer has a
traveler’s profile, the order will be different from if the
customer has the profile of someone who focuses on graphics
editing, or purely on specifications.
Assuming that the customer wants to watch movies on a
couch, so battery life and screen size are of critical importance
and they are placed on top.
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39. Also based on the respondent’s profile, we present the filters
as open or closed, and we label the suggested filter level with
an additional benefit description to promote specific levels.
The benefit information would normally only be visible by
clicking on the filter level. The benefit description will vary
based on the interest and profile of the customer set
beforehand.
39

40. The section to the right shows all products that the customer
can choose from. Each product has a tile with a small
description. A tile can be selected to access more detailed
information about the product. In this application, we present
the customer with rating information, which can either be
customer ratings or expert ratings.
A label is put over a product to emphasize a benefit. This
gives users the impression this product is more suitable for
their needs. Which product is or products are labeled, will be
based on the respondent’s profile and will be different for a
travel customer from the kitchen-table movie-watching
customer.
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41. In a future paper we will share learnings about how customers
respond to our manipulations. The e-tailor program helps
ecommerce businesses to experiment and to learn how to
identify segments and then to tailor the task design and
information to the needs of the segments so that they search
more effectively and comfortably and are happier with the
result.
The e-tailor playground provides a cost-effective and risk-free
experimental environment that replicates e-commerce reality
and helps optimize e-commerce environments.
41

42. This presentation was delivered by Gerard Loosschilder, Chief
Innovation Officer and Willem Buijs, Interaction Designer, at
the Insight Innovation Exchange conference in the Georgia
Tech conference center in Atlanta (GA, USA) on June 18,
2014.
The presentation taps into insights extracted from SKIM’s E-
Tailor program, which combines insights from choice modeling
and interaction design to help drive the conversion and
satisfaction rates of online retail.
You can reach Gerard at g.loosschilder@skimgroup.com and
Willem at wjbuijs@gmail.com.
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