Sometimes in the startup phase of a business, you’ll wrestle with the big issues for months at a time until you think you’ve nailed them. You feel like you’ve finally solved one of the great problems of our time. You get the big issues implemented in your front-end, announce it to your users, and sit back and wait for the world to change.
And it doesn’t. Argh!
Then, one day you’ll mostly have your mind on something else, when a little tiny change will pop into your head. Seemingly of no great importance, you’ll add it to the list of a hundred things you need to implement, and one day, perhaps because you just need to do something simple for a while, you’ll push it to production. You might not even think to mention it to users, colleagues or investors. It’s no big deal.
Except that it turns out to be a huge deal. And you’re almost trampled to death in the rush to declare you a genius. What happened?
Creating successful new web businesses means addressing a mixture of big issues and small issues in equal measure, with equal attention. Because sometimes, it’s addressing the little issues that nudge your business over the line between OK and wildly successful. I was reminded of this reading how Jared Spool changed a single button on a client’s shopping cart checkout process. In doing so, he fixed a hidden problem that was affecting users so often that the client made an additional $300 million that year.
The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?
What really strikes me about the story is not that the change of a single button can make a $300 million difference (some online retailers are vast) but that Jared’s usability testing didn’t set out to solve that problem, and nobody had any idea that a small change would make a 45% difference to sales. The form as originally designed was identical to many other online checkout processes, it wasn’t like this was bad design; it was merely “not-good-enough” design.
I have my own (vastly less valuable) experience to draw on, working on improving with an online business I co-founded. It taught me an unforgettable lesson on the importance of small things.
We had a free trial offer on our product which cost us a lot to maintain because the product was expensive to deliver and we’d charge you nothing for it for 30 days, just so you could try it out. There wasn’t much we could do to reduce the cost of the offer, since our competitors all did something similar. We’d bill you at the end of 30 days if we didn’t hear from you first but too many of our new customers were leaving, either during the trial period or immediately after they’d noticed the charge on their credit card statement.
I wanted to learn more about what was causing trial customers to abandon our product so I worked on adding a new process for deleting your account that asked you to fill in a quick exit survey on your use of the product and your reasons for leaving. I wasn’t hoping to do any more than learn a little that I could apply to a new free trial offer.
But I got a small miracle instead: the abandonment rate dropped the day we introduced the survey form. I had expected to collect some data; I hadn’t expected to make a dent in the numbers. Intrigued, we spent some time over the next few weeks tweaking the number and the kind of questions included in the exit survey. A free text field that had to be completed in order to finish the exit survey actually decreased abandonment rates by about 5% all on its own.
Here were users trying something new and big and significant, and then deciding they didn’t want to pay for it, yet I was persuading them to pay for another 30 days’ service by just asking them why they didn’t want to be a customer anymore. It was the simplest thing we implemented in six months yet it led to a big change on our business metrics.
I learned that the line between OK and wildly successful is only visible in hindsight. You can never see it as you approach it, or even as you cross over it. You must look backwards to even know it is there. “Ah yes!” You’ll say, “That was clearly the point at which we crossed the line. How could we have not seen that coming?”
You never will. Instead, focus on a mix of the big things and the little things every day. The author of ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff” wasn’t writing about starting an internet business. You need both the big stuff and the small stuff working for you until you figure out what this new business of yours is really all about.