12 of the Top 10 things I learned in my year with Sears Social Shopping

I first wrote and published this story in July, 2011 on the Sears Holdings User Experience Blog. Maybe 14 months before this, when Chairman Eddie Lampert decided Sears needed to move into the realm of social ( network ) shopping, I happened to be the social practice lead for the Sears online business unit, even though I had plenty of other duties at the time.

For this new initiative I was promoted to principal user experience architect — the first one in our org — and given egis over the UX of the whole thingy… which means I designed it from the bar napkin stage forward. After a long 12 months where I learned more about corporate silliness than I could put in a book. Sears Social Shopping went away, to be replaced by a program called “Shop Your Way.” Yikes, look it up, sometime. This story was something I wrote reflecting on what I’d learned in that year.

I tagged this post as “things that might get me fired.”

After a little more than a year, Sears Social as a lot of us knew it is gone. Now we’re tooling up for the Next Social Thing, and I thought I’d share some things I’ve learned. So, a Top Ten list of things I’ve come to realize. Some of these things I knew before, but all of them are things I’ve received some very pointed lessons on over the last year. Sorry ( kinda ) if I ramble, here.

Value to us is not value to them

What we think is cool, or what’s valuable to us is usually not even remotely what’s valuable to the customer, who you in fact need to engage in your thingy in order for you to be successful. For each experience you propose, design, build, and analyze, you need to know the values for the business, and the value for the customer. These should not be copied/pasted from the last project doc into the next. Knowing the honest value of something from both points of view gives you a great place to start with all the pesky details, such as interface, experience, and implementation.

“If you build it, they will come” is flat out wrong.

This might work for some aspects of what we do online, but not for Social experiences. There are too many different places asking for eyeballs, raising the premium on value. “Amazon has something, so we need that same something to remain competitive” can be dangerous thinking, if you pin hopes of success on people simply showing up on our corner and do something simply because “they do it at Amazon”. You need to actively, meticulously plan for engagement. Sometimes it happens by wonderful accident, or by the power of an amazing idea (cough zombiesears, cough cough) but betting on that happening as a magical, organic process is way-risky. Planning and working for it is better.

Engagement is not a function of how much traffic gets diverted to our site. Saying so is disingenuous, believing so delusional

It’s tempting to think that Sears Social was not successful with the public because we didn’t actively pour traffic onto it. But think about Groupon, or Quora, or for that matter Google. Do you think any of these ideas needed the bootstrap of traffic thrown at them to be successful? The hard truth is, if your thing fails, it’s probably not because “enough” people didn’t see it; a good idea is a good idea, and will be passed along. If your idea didn’t get passed along like a great joke, more than likely it’s because it wasn’t a good idea. Or just not well-executed. Funneling a ton of users to it in hopes it will catch is not truly designing value, and counting those users as fans is silly.

“We need some social in here” is not an informed strategy, and is not enough to move the ball

“Social” — that is, online interactions that involve groups of people communicating together — is complex, nuanced stuff. Saying a project needs more “social” is like saying a meal you’re cooking up needs more spices. Yea? What’s the goal, here? What does success look like? How do people coming to us behave? What do they want, and need? Find the person in the room who says “I think we need some social stuff over here, on this side of the page,” and you’ve found someone who knows very little about effective use of social media, but doesn’t know enough to ask or learn.

Religious devotion to the concept of “First to market” in sacrifice to quality, elegance, or value prop, is toxic.

There are circumstances where this idea works out, but they are so rare that making it an article of faith in your strategy (while eschewing value by cutting corners on the harder parts of design and testing) sounds like a recipe to fail. The trick is to be first with a quality product, not just to be first with something that resembles something. The iPod and Google were not the first to market. — Getting garbage out first still gets out garbage. Thinking you’ll do it better later costs more than doing it better the first time. This is an article of faith in the UX discipline, but the idea that something might take time to do right is often anathema, and we pay the price.

You can’t bribe people to engage with your thingy.

Your idea, your site will take off with people if it provides value, it’s funny, it’s novel, or it’s sexy. Even more so if it’s more than one of those things. Giving them points or discounts, giving them badges, highlighting them in some way… none of this works to create engagement if you don’t provide easy, usable value. You can certainly reward them with points, badges, $5 off, and fame after they engage, but to think these will work as carrots for your experience in place of genuine value, humor, novelty, or sexiness is probably a mistake.

A simple, elegant vision makes all the other decisions easy.

“We strive to be successful in Social Commerce” is not a vision. A feature list is not a strategy. “Doohicky.com does it so we need to do it” is also not a strategy, by the way. Only a vision, and strategy to act on that vision, has the magic power to make all other subsequent decisions easier. Does our thingy need modals? Should we make the customer register up front, or later? How do we best encourage them to do this social commerce thing? All of these questions get much easier to answer correctly if you have a clear vision of what you’re trying to do to fall back on. If you don’t have one of these, then you need to answer “Is this done in a modal, a layer, or in line?” a million times. And that’s sure fun, isn’t it?

Social commerce is about people, buying, together.

Connecting them in ways that make sense is the magic that will make all this commerce stuff happen. Successfully bring that conversation online, and use the tools of social media to go beyond what the customer can do by simply calling or IMing a friend and asking which grill should be bought, and you win. ?You want people to engage with one another to help shopping decisions? Make it easy for them to do so. Want them to engage with Experts? Highlight the experts, show them as credible and easy to engage with. Make it all easier and more valuable to me than just calling my friend and asking which grill I should buy.

For everything, we need an easy-honest-correct answer for the customer’s question: “Why would I ever do this?”

If the only answer we have is “Because we’d like them to,” we fail. And our subsequent metrics will almost certainly confirm this.

Leadership is hard.

“Because I said so” didn’t sit well in grade school, and it works even less now. The ability to encourage a team to deliver more than what they think they can is a gift, whose successful use must be earned. Simply telling people they need to do more because insert-high-level-stakeholder’s-name-here asked for it in email might work in the near term, but does not scale. The goal of any hard work should be worthwhile. If the goal doesn’t seem worthwhile to the team, then a team will only put out the effort for a leader they respect, and that respect needs to be earned. The leaders that can do this are precious, and few. So it is always better to have a goal that’s seen as worthwhile.

Specifying a UX before you have a clear, elegant goal is always wrong.

The experience, the flow, the interface, are always functions of what idea you have, what you’re trying to get across, and how you’d like people to engage with it. Defining the interface first is like saying you’re not sure what you’d like to build, but you’d really like to use this circular saw, because you love circular saws.

“Impossible” is something that can be redefined.

Like the Matrix, what we do with social commerce, what we do as a team, and the profound effect we have are all pretty plastic. Whatever we think we can do, we can probably do much more than that. All this social stuff is insanely powerful, done the right way. The right way is definitely hard, takes thought, and time. But the payoff is amazing. Before coming here I’d never imagine we could redo all the layouts for all our sites in about 50 days, or that we could launch a full-on social site in less time than that. But we did it, and I was inspired. “We can’t do that, it’s impossible,” is largely a decision, and a matter of lack of will.

I’m sure there are many lessons I’ve forgotten. Also a few I didn’t go into, like “The people you work with make all the difference,” and so on.