Website Application Design - Milkshake Usability Part 1

Usability and milkshakes: Need to sell more widgets? To answer this question the first challenge is to know why your customers want to buy them. Don't assume you already know.

In the book, The Innovator's Solution, the brilliant team of Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor recount the illuminating story of a certain fast-food chain (they don't actually cite the presence of any golden arches, but it's pretty clear who they're talking about) that had a problem. Milkshake sales were going down and nobody seemed to have a good answer as to why- let alone how to reverse the trend. Everything they tried seemed to have no effect on sales.

Team after team of consultants were brought in to analyze the situation and each of them spectacularly failed to find a solution. Only by taking a hard look at some facts that most assumed they already knew, was one team able to hit on the core of the issue.

The failed attempts did sometimes look at the customers themselves, but they focused first on technical aspects of the product. Should the consistency be smooth or lumpy? Is the chocolate flavoring too strong, taste too artificial?, and so on. At least they communicated with some sampling of customers, which was a good thing, but it turns out, they weren't asking the right questions.

Of course, knowing some low-level specifics about what your customers like is not a bad thing, but often you only get at particular preferences and reactions to product designs. Sometimes you need to take a step back and look at why people choose your product over another thing altogether. Remember, your competition is not just the other guy selling similar widgets.

Ultimately, the winning ticket was held by the consultants who looked at the historic pattern of sales and dove in deep to try and understand what the user was trying to do when they purchased a milkshake in the first place. The catchy phrase the authors use is "what job or jobs did the customer ‘hire' a milkshake to do?"

By analyzing the issue this way; that is, stepping back far enough to understand the customer's motivation for "hiring a milkshake", the firm was ultimately able to explain why there was a surprisingly huge number of milkshakes purchased on weekday mornings (yeah, early morning), at the drive-through, and by customers who were the only occupants of their vehicle.

It turned out the job these people were hiring a milkshake to perform was not "be my dessert" or even necessarily "feed my sweet-tooth". Instead, these people were hiring it to keep them occupied with something to do on their otherwise boring commute to work.

Lessons learned included making sure the drink was thick enough to last 20 minutes or so. They even added chunks of fruit --not for health effect or to attract health-conscious customers, but to slow down the process of getting through the treat too fast. Once they identified and served this need, their marketing machine was able to target the right people with the right approach. The result? Sales rocketed.