Designing for Use: Customer Lookup
I’m working on a Point-of-Sale like project for a retailer that needed a simple form to qualify a customer at the beginning of an order. It is often helpful for the service associate to review a customer’s past order history and allows them to skip the step of capturing contact info all over again.
When tasked with designing form - the immediate interaction in my head was a very simple form with a single search box. The associate could type in the customer’s name and the system would immediately start searching the customer records for a match. The associate could quickly select a matching record, or click a button to expose a for a new customer:
This worked well enough. The immediate feedback that the results provided as you were typing made the interaction very simple intuitive. However stepping through the process was kind of clunky - especially if you needed to create a new customer. My second revision was just to make a the new customer form persistent. This made the UI a bit more conversational - “search for a customer, OR create a new one.”
Note: While it’s not relevant to the topic of this post - commenter Cam Beck pointed out that the assumed opt-in here isn’t very nice to customers. The customer’s email in the final product will be used only to notify order completion. At that point the customer will opt-in to marketing communication.
-Travis
This worked even better. The development team built it out and we demoed it - the stakeholders were delighted. This was a few weeks ago.
It wasn’t until today that I realized that I had it all wrong.
My form tailored the interaction with the assumption that most customers would already be in the system. The reality is that this is not the case. A quick gut-check with the client confirmed that in fact, only one in five customers are repeat (this isn’t as bad as it sounds - given the nature of the product that they are selling).
In my most recent revision of the form, I removed the search box all together and started with the new customer form. The behavior works exactly the same - the associate will type a customer’s name (or other info) into the form and the system will immediately search for an existing record.
By making this simple change - we tailored the form to the most common usage scenario - and - bonus - simplified the form by letting the new customer form pull double duty.
Cam Beck said:
Aaaagh… Why opt-out instead of opt-in?
Travis Isaacs said:
In this case - it’s not for marketing purposes - it’s to receive an email when you order is finished. After the order is finished, the customer will have the opportunity to opt-in to marketing communication.
Miriam said:
All the privacy issues immediately popped into my head, but then I saw the final one with some encryption. I’m also working on some log-in solutions, but we not only have new customers, but alot of repeat customers or phone customers who have not purchased on the web.
You’ve spurned alot of great thinking about simplifying, so thanks!
Cam Beck said:
Excellent! I was hoping it was something like that. :)
Rajarajan said:
Thats excellent. A good way to simplify