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 We're happy to learn from your experience what actually helped you creating great concepts, so let's keep in touch on ideas how to improve and streamline this process.
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What is a Product Guide
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concept?
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The Product Guide
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concept (or advisor concept), defines:
- the phases of the user interface
- the questions and answer options
- the (dynamic) question flow between the phases / questions / answer options, i.e. which question/answer option is presented in response to user actions or product data
- the intended recommendation behavior for each answer option and their combinations
- the way of how all of the above is presented to the user (i.e. content, images, user interface)
Do's and Don'ts
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Do'sthink how your best personal sales representative / service staff proceeds work with your market research, web analytics and business intelligence team / data think and work user-centric; try to take the end-user perspective work test driven and iterative to allow quick improvements forget all the details you know about your products for a while - since this is how new customers interact with your website - check the references on www.excentos.com how excentos already solved certain problems - and consider what you like and dislike into your concept thoughts
- create an engaging shopping experience. Use nice images and entertaining and informing explanation content to provide insights to your shoppers
- create a click path that is not too long and asks only relevant questions
- define a target clickthrough time depending on your target group and the complexity of your product assortment / the buying decision.
- E.g. for take-away-products, the clickpath should not be longer than 90 seconds.
But for complex products where users buy only once every 5 years, the clickpath may take 2 minutes, sometimes even longer. We realized session durations of even longer than 5 minutes, but this is only justified if the Advisor Concept presents engaging explanation content
- challenge the formulation of questions and answer options. Can every user understand them?
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Don'tsdon't forget there are different target groups out there: some users know a lot about the products, others don't. Use the Question Flow features to offer additional info / questions to e.g. expert buyers don't look at your product data too early; neither too late  don't stick to your warehousing logic / category system / product assortment rules. Think of use cases instead don't make it too complex - after all, the user wants to take the buying decision as easy as possible (of course depending on the product category's complexity) - don't try to cram everything (e.g. all product categories, all target groups, all questions/answers) in one Product Guide or one single click-flow
- don't think about organizational barriers, different marketing / category managers and sales initiatives of your organization for a while
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