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This is the short documentation to give you a starting point only. excentos developed a very detailed and in-depth process for product guide concept creation that is far more detailed than what you see here. This, however, takes some time to learn, a lot of experience and is our company expertise and thus not open to the public.
The process is based on excentos intensive extensive experience from plenty of projects in a wide range of product categories and millions of usage data records from countless Product Guide sessions.
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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.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
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- 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's
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Discuss Your Concept With excentos and Let the Guided Selling Gurus Optimize
Don'ts
don'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
Step by Step to Your Product Guide Concept
The key steps of the process to develop a sound product guide concept are listed here.
Please use the page "Product Guide Concept Definition" provided in your Confluence Space to document your results. If you have trouble defining your concept, contact excentos.
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Who are the users? What do they know about your products? How much time do they want to spend searching a solution?
It may help to define several "persona" that showcase different types of user needs, search profiles and e.g. web usage patterns.
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Ask yourself the following questions:
- can users of the target group find a product / take a buying decision in your current shop or website?
- can they understand your product names?
- can they understand the website navigation / category names?
- can they distinguish your marketing texts? Your product images? Your product data tables?
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Define topics and / or user requirements that are important to your target group when searching for products.
If you defined different target groups / persona, are there different topics / user requirements?
Group similar topics to define topic groups that could be presented together to the user
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(iterative with "define topics" and "check dependencies":)
define questions and answer options for each topic.
Carefully define the exact text for each question and answer option.
If you have trouble defining precise and understandable content (for your target group!), you probably missed out one of the steps before.
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Think about in which order and context you would like to present the questions. Depending on the user interface, it makes sense to group the questions into separate Stages (each containing one or more questions).
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excentos offers a variety of different Themes. Please check our Theme description or test them yourselves in your Workbench account. Each Theme contains a description for intended usecases and features.
Here is what you should pay attention to when choosing the Theme:
- complexity of your product category and your target group
- how well does it integrate into your shop / website from a design / user experience perspective
- how well does it support your Advisor Concept (and especially the desired image & explanation content usage)
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Providing great images and explanation content is crucial for a good conversion rate and upselling of your Product Guide.
Depending on whether you want to create an emotional shopping experience, or show a lot of explanations and product features, you will most probably need different images.
Please check that our different Themes make different use of decoration images and explanation images.
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Configure the desired recommendation behavior
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It helps to define which Reason texts / statements about the products and requirements you would like to present to the user.
Good Reasonings enhance the result list and its conversion since every positive Reason provides an argument why to buy the product.
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Pre-test
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Get some users to test your concept. Make the following tests:
- do users understand what question / answer stands for which of their self-expressed user requirements?
do the the questions and answers help them to get to a product that fulfills their needs. Present example products (as defined in the step "Desired Recommendation Behavior") to them to see their smile or dislikes
- how long did it take to get to a buying decision?
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It is crucial that your users easily find the Product Guide, whenever they are stuck in the buying decision and otherwise risk to abondon your website.
We've created many tips and examples in this Onsite Marketing and Linking documentation on how to successfully link into the Product Guide and at the same time increase traffic and conversion of your shop:
You now should have a good concept in place that creates a good basis for going live. The best thing now is to go live in order to collect usage data, analyze it in the excentos ANALYTICS and optimize it based on the usage data.
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Of course, excentos will be happy providing you with tips and tricks...
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Here are just some examples of our expertise to get the best out of your Product Guide and really optimize your Digital Sales:
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