Case Study: Three Column Layouts and Seducible Moments

September 21, 2004

Users on today’s Web are no longer just browsing, but are looking for a very specific thing (content, a job, a book) before they even hit your site. Anything that gets in the way of that task (an advertisement, a promotion, etc) not only annoys the user and reduces the probability that they will get what the wanted when they came to the site. At the same time suggesting an item of interest before the User has found the article or product they were looking for has a low probability of being converted into a desired user action.

Several people over the last few years have been promoting the concept of Seducible Moments within User Tasks. Among them, Andrew Chak has been at the forefront of this movement by putting forth the idea that sites not only need to be usable, by using elements in the design that will motivate users to make the right decision or perform a preferred task. Those elements are in many cases are strategically placed on a place to take advantage of a seducible moment within a User’s decision process.

Simply put, a seducible moment is a moment in time when a person is the most susceptible to a cross-sell. In the real world we have all experienced this type of situation on an almost daily basis:

• When ordering a meal at a fast-food restaurant – “Would you like to Super Size that?”
• Buying a car – “Do you want to get the upgraded suspension or the service contract as well?”
• Buying a movie – “Oh, I see that you like action adventure. You might this movie as well”

Each of these examples are instances where we as consumers right after we have gotten what we wanted—food, a consumer product, etc. at the check out counter are at our most vulnerable and influential state. In the retail world this phenomenon is referred to as suggestive selling and we see it everyday.

In any of the examples mentioned above an attempt to cross-sell something before or well after a person made a decision to buy a specific product would be futile. The reason this is true is because we as consumers have not gotten what we set out to get yet. We need to be satisfied we got what we wanted in the first place before being open to suggestion (Figure 1).

Now take this concept to the Web and one can see similar applications when it comes to related content, job applications or promotions. Every marketer or content author would love to promote a new feature or content item that might be of interest to his or her User. In some cases it may be a similar job opportunity to one that a Candidate just applied to or a piece of content that is related to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues.

The fundamental difference in meeting these desires is in the approach of seducing users with the cross-sell. It is this aspect of the user experience of a site that needs to be well thought-out and carried out in a very subtle manner. It is the difference between a hard sell and a soft sell at a car dealership. We all know what the end-result of a hard-sell is at an auto dealership, so the secret with Seducible Moments on the Web is the art of the soft-sell and timing in the User decision cycle.

In the case of Protiviti’s user experience, the concept of the cross-sell and seducible moments are completely embedded into the site DNA from the start. The site approaches seducible moments with a very subtle shift in layout and content that appeals to the use of content columns and areas of user focus that are context and page specific.

The use of a 3-Column layout (Example 1) approaches content as “zones of focus” where each column serves a specific purpose. Remembering that the goal of our user is to get the information they wanted, this center column (B) is the primary content section for any given page on the site. The other areas of the page are reserved for navigation (Column A) and tools. To gain maximum

leverage of a seducible moment, the user experience leverages a third column on the right (Column C) as a utility area that is page specific.

The 3-Column Model on Protiviti suggests related information to the user at the point of the User life-cycle when they have found what it is they were looking for on the website. By breaking up the page into these information zones, there is a greater opportunity leveraging this strategy to subtly suggest to users content and promotions that (in)directly relates to the content they are focused on (Column B). So, in a situation where a user was looking for an article about Sarbanes-Oxley compliance (for example) the best time to cross-sell a related article to them is on the page with the Sarbanes-Oxley material they set out to find when they came to the web site.

As long as the information presented in the Third Column is related to the main article in the center of the page there is an opportunity to cross-sell that item at the point where the user has gotten what they wanted. Thus, generating a new need for information via the cross-sell at that seducible moment in the user decision cycle and the whole process starts again. This is a very subtle play on suggestion that, if applied properly with appropriate related content, can lead to multiple paths of cross-selling information and cross-linking of content contained on a website.

The 3-Column Model is just one example of how you can leverage a brief moment in the User’s decision process to cross-sell related information to him or her. In a content heavy user experience, such as Protiviti, this column-based approach is very appropriate as it borrows from the news-based page layout schemes that are used into traditional print with page specific content suggestions.

However, the principles illustrated here can be easily be applied in a multitude of ways from a layout perspective without using a column based layout. The devil really is in the content development and related content strategy that an IA develops for any website.

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Posted by ajf at September 21, 2004 03:16 PM | case study , | user experience