The improving online customer experience

Wow! I had the same experience yesterday! I too wanted to know the cookie names so I could e-mail my order to a young friend. And, I was surprised that the Girl Scouts website didn't have the information. It's not like this is the first year they're selling cookies. Thankfully, I found the information I needed from Wikipedia also. I wonder how many other customers though, will start with the most logical path, get frustrated, and give up the search.

You make a good point for websites. But, I would take it a step further. Customer-driven businesses of any type should be asking if their experience is easy and user-friendly for the customer. Sometimes all the bells and whistles interfere with the message and the experience.

Thanks for the article.

The trouble with Wikipedia is that it lists EVERY kind of Girl Scout cookie made and sold in the U.S. Each region is supplied by either Little Brownie Bakers or ABC Bakers. So...if you want to know what varieties are available, you still have to ask the child! Here in the Northeast, you'll find that these are the cookies your Girl Scout is offering: http://www.girlscoutcookiesabc.com/atc/default.asp

Good article - had a similar experience with GS a year or two ago. One tangential point I would add, which is consistent with the listening to the customer mindset, is the lack of healthy alternatives offered by the Girl Scouts - with the plague of obesity, maybe they should be providing healthier, organic snacks.

Hey Mark: This is the best thing that you've written (in my humble opinion) since I joined your mailing list. And why is that? Ironically, it is because of the emotion involved...you want to order Girl Scout cookies (our collective hearts skip a beat, our collective tummies grumble: "Girl Scout cookies!"), you need those cookies, you want cookies--but what cookies?, you have a niece to accomodate, you want to be a good guy, you are a hungry guy--this is drama and this pulls us through all the details and keeps us with you every step of the way...don't disrespect emotion just because you have a need for efficiency at the moment...good graphics and typefaces and color choices matter in this world and so does simplicity of design---these are not conflicting elements...they can be abused, that's all...peace, Nick

Confidence in the information is also a crucial factor in the user's experience. I'll trust Wikipedia's listing of Girl Scout cookies because (1) the information is relatively easy to verify and (2) it's not a terribly important topic (not that I won't be ordering Girl Scout cookies!). Is Wikipedia a good source for other routine topics of importance, however? Try a Wikipedia search on 'Car Tires.' Try 'Democrats and Republicans.' The point: I don't think Wikipedia is consistently there yet: it's still very hit and miss.

Ah, yes, how beautifully stated...here you are, with ONE question, one very important question, a question that every other GS Cookie customer would want answered...and you didn't find it on their website! Sad.

What's REALLY sad is how much companies pay for websites that never answer those important questions, because they never ask customers what questions they want answered. So simple, so difficult to do.

Great article.

I've had the same sort of experience from inside a site redesign. In the initial wireframes, Marketing buried the link to platform compatibility info -- knowing full well from our Web analytics that it was one of the most popular pages on the site. They just didn't consider it important to our "message."

I have to disagree, quite passionately. Ignore the emotional response? Are you kidding? I guess Nike, Coke, and variety of emotional responsive marketing, is just worthless, right? I guess your saying you don't care if the steering wheel of your car is pink, the room color of your bedroom is neon green, and the color of your toothpaste is black. Color DOES make a difference. Images DO make a difference. They help to define emotional response, placement, and communication overall. What you're ticked off about is copy. It's not the fault of design that makes your user experience wrong, it's sloppy information architecture. If all the information was there, you'd have no reason to write this article. But it's not the color or graphic elements that are the problem. That I disagree with. You might want to find a text only web browser, maybe that would make you happy. Pardon my passion, but this comment frustrated me.
- richard, creative director

I don't think Mark is saying that colour, typeface etc. don't matter, but they certainly don't matter as much as functionality! I've experienced the battle of trying to make sure that a website works, whilst marketing/communications are concentrating wholly on branding, insisting on a certain look and feel even when it degrades the user experience. Functionality First!

Well put, Simon - thanks.

I think you cheated on this one, Mark. In my book it's the #1 sin of user experience consultants such as you and me. Your pitch makes it sound so easy, but when the ue advice meets reality, the devil's in the details. Especially with Girl Scout cookies. Take it from this UE consultant that's also a mom of an entrepreneurial eight-year-old girl marketing cookies through email.

I would argue accuracy in the information is an even more crucial factor in the user's experience. This is not going to be the usual wikipedia rant - wikipedia did a great job of explaining the "problem" which you complety skip in your post.

In this case, as wikipedia kindly points out that each year the bakers change,and each year several of the cookies change. However, the critical bits here are that each local girl scout council chooses which baker to use and cookies vary by girl scout council.

This means that if you are buying cookies from a Palo Alto girl scout troop you have a somewhat different set of cookies from a Menlo Park girl Scout, although these two well known cities are next to each other.

If you had ordered Brownie Bites and Cartwheels from your young cousin there would have been a problem - confusion and disappointment.

In addition to different cookie choices, there's the issue of ingredients (last year, one bakers of thin mints had tran fats, the other didn't!)

There's also the issue for those with allergies, one baker certified different cookies to be nut-free. That's a matter of life and death for some folks.

In this case, to get truly accurate info, you need to know either the baker of the cookies, or the council that the troop is a part of (how many 8 year olds can remember that?). You can't even do a simple zip code search, because there's often a difference between where you are, where the girlscout lives, and where they go to school, and occasionally which school hosts the troop.

I am in agreement that finding cookie info from the GS website is completely broken. However , as is the case in many big organizations the distributed and fractional nature of the organization lies at the core of the problem.

It's what I call the "order of magnitude dilemma" when there is a part of the product/process design that causes massive user experience problems that trickle down into all the rest of the user experience. As long as that big problem exists, all the rest of your user experience work will be warped by the massive unfixed problem.

Thanks for the article. Good reminders.

So...what cookies did you order??!

Speaking of good online customer experiences... any chance of this website improving how articles print? ;-)

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." - R. Buckminster Fuller

We should strive for experiences that are rewarding on many levels, not just ease of use. Of course, usability is first (what good would a house be if you couldn't live in it), but aesthetics matter, too (between two equally habitable houses, wouldn't you choose the more attractive one?).