User experience. This phrase has been tossed around a lot in the last few years, but few have actually mastered applying it in all aspects of their business. Most businesses focus on the wire-framing and usability testing, but there are some even easier ways to reel in customers and keep them coming back.

Jason Broughton, head of UX for Zappos, weighs in on how to make your website useful, usable, and an experience that will ensure customers will keep coming back for more.

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(With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Jason Broughton of Zappos.com)

Andrew: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast, the show dedicated to helping high six and seven-figure entrepreneurs build amazing online companies and incredible lives. I’m your host and fellow eCommerce entrepreneur, Andrew Youderian.

Hey, you guys, it’s Andrew here, and welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today. Today on the show, talking about UX, otherwise known as user experience, and joined by Jason Broughton, who’s the head of UX at Zappos. Zappos, of course, is the very well-known shoe and apparel retailer. Jason’s got an incredible depth of experience doing this both at Zappos and a number of other companies. And we dive into what UX is.

UX is one of those issues that is a little bit ambiguous, sometimes. What it is, the process at Zappos for improving UX, how data-driven they are, some of his favorite tools. We talk about the future of site usability and what’s coming down the pipe in terms of changes, things that are coming down the road, a lot of different ground. So I came away with a pretty substantial to-do list for my own site, and I hope it’s something that you find applicable as well. We’ll go ahead and dive right in.

Jason, UX is a term that gets thrown around a lot online, and I think people are very familiar with what paid advertising is, what web design is, what programming is. But UX is a little fuzzier for a lot of people in terms of what it actually means. Can you give us a sense of what it means to you and what it encompasses?

What Exactly Is UX?

Jason: Yeah, it’s a good question. To me, UX is a lot of the things that you just mentioned, plus it has a lot to do with the usability of your site, the accessibility of the site, and the overall pleasure a customer has interacting with your site. It needs to be both useful, usable, and delightful, and not necessarily in that order, but we try to encapsulate all three of those. If your site isn’t useful, no one is going to come to it. If it’s not usable, people have a hard time interacting with it. And lastly, if it’s not delightful, the loyalty of your product is not going to be what it could be.

Andrew: That puts a lot of weight on your shoulders, it sounds like.

Jason: It can. Yeah, it does. But we have a great team. And it is a lot of stress at some times.

The Most Important Thing to the Zappos Customer

Andrew: What is most important to the Zappos customer in terms of user experience? Obviously, Zappos is a brand, is immensely focused on customer service, that’s what you guys have built your brand on. But how does that translate into the actual user experience of the web experience, of the website?

Jason: Yeah. I think that customer experiences encapsulates all of your customers’ touch-points, whether it’s over the phone or on the website, or when they un-box to package. User experience is more about the interaction touch-point on the website. So it’s when someone’s interacting with the website, specifically. And so a lot of the things that we have to worry about, and our users care a lot about, is accurate information from pricing, to being sure that there’s trust when they’re going through the checkout process, so the usefulness, the usability is quick. And then also, they care about the emotional connection that we’re making with them, so the language that we’re presenting them through the product, how we’re communicating back and forth via e-mail.

It’s just all the touch-points that we think about on a website, are we communicating accurately? Are we getting them through as quick as possible? And then, the tone of voice through this process of making sure that we’re keeping it light and fun.

The Language of UX

Andrew: You mentioned the language as being a component. And traditionally, I guess I would have thought of that more in the realm of copywriting. But it makes sense, of course, that it’s part of the whole process to, you mentioned before, to delight people. How do you approach that? Because that seems like…again, when I think of UX, probably unfairly, I think more of wire-framing and usability testing. How do you take that approach into the actual language and copywriting to help make sure the experience is fantastic?

Jason: Yeah. Quite frankly, we approach copy the same way that we approach screen design. So we start with getting a great understanding of who we’re designing for. We build archetypes that we call “personas” or “characters.” And we are referencing those archetypes during our design process. So if we were designing a piece…and I think of copywriting as another form of design. So if we’re designing copy or we’re designing a widget, it’s sort of the same thing.

We use that same mental model of who we’re designing for, and we think of, for instance, the voice and tone in the interactions the same way that we would think of the voice and tone in the copy. So if someone is, for instance, hovering on a button, the interactions that would happen once that button is clicked, the animations, that all needs to flow and feel the same as the tone in the copy. So yeah, we think of it quite the same way.

Andrew: Are copywriters at Zappos, people who write the product descriptions, are they under the umbrella of the UX team?

Jason: Yeah, that’s a little different. We have yes and no. We have folks that are churning out a lot of copy product descriptions, and that’s their primary focus because of the amount of products that we have on the site. We do have copywriters that are specifically writing UI copy. And then we have copywriters that are focused more on marketing copy. But yes, we all are working with the same set of personas under the same voice and tone, rough guidelines, and working to the same end goal.

From Start to Finish: The Life of a Zappos UX Project

Andrew: So this next question might not be very fair, especially to try to give it a short, concise, packaged answer to. And going into that with eyes wide open, what’s the process like at Zappos to improve UX? How do you guys…and again, I know it’s fairly involved, but at a high level, how do you guys go through that to try to make your user experience better for customers?

Jason: Absolutely. It absolutely depends on the phase of a project. So if it’s a blue sky, we want to add a new feature, or we’re approaching a market differently, we would handle that in a separate way than if it’s we’re optimizing or we’re pushing a smaller feature forward.

So I’ll take, for instance, if we’re moving something forward on our website, it’s more of an optimization feature. The great thing about Zappos…and I would recommend this to any company, is that we listen to our customers intensely. We’re known for customer service. And so, we have a direct channel to call in, and there’s a constant feedback loop from our customers, to our customer service reps, then back to the design team.

There’s an email feed that they’re just constantly updating us with customer feedback. And we’ll pull that feedback together, and we’ll start to see patterns in the feedback. And we know that’s a particular feature that we had to address. Just the other day, it’s a minor thing, but we had misspelled a term on the site. So we wouldn’t have caught that unless our customers would have called in to let us know that.

It’s from small things like that to bigger things like one of our sister sites, 6pm, doesn’t have a favorites feature, and we get requests for a favorite feature all the time. And so now, we’re investigating a favorites feature. But it’s critically important to have that open communication channel from the folks on the front line to the folks doing the design work. I know in smaller companies, that can sometimes be the same people. But as you grow, oftentimes, you’ll lose that connection. And so it’s critically important to keep that connection.

The Best Place for Customer Feedback

Andrew: Is there a best place that you have for getting customer feedback? And obviously, I’m guessing an organization like Zappos, you probably have ways for whoever it is, customer service, someone on the e-mail desk to be able to route those to you. But if you had to pick one place to try to get the best feedback, is it a post-purchase survey? Is it a popup? Is it really just trying to mak