The Escalator Problem

Is stepping on an escalator easy or tough? The answer depends on whether you’ve already been on one. Imagine someone who’s comfortable on escalators (e.g. me) explaining “how to step on an escalator” to someone who’s not (e.g. my Mom) and I’d probably say something like, “you just take a step forward, that’s all - nothing will happen, worst case, just grab the handrail and you will be fine”. and no prizes for guessing how effective this is. 

Doesn’t work.

This is the escalator problem. However, it is not just an escalator problem. I have seen teachers (“maths is easy”) explaining it thus to students (“maths is hard”), and I see it happen every day now on eCommerce. Let’s face it, most of eCommerce is built by techies and not retailers, not consumers. Hence you have this common occurrence of people in the room (“eCommerce is easy”) not being able to figure why the traffic (“eCommerce is tough”) isn’t converting. How many of us working in eCommerce companies have taken efforts to design a site that’s easiest for the first-timer to figure? 

As a first step, we should try and understand the first-timer better. Identifying him / her is easy, researching his / her state is easy, creating a simple flow for, and assisting the first transaction is also easy (remember Microsoft’s paper-clip assistant that us evolved users found irritating? guess what, a lot of newbies loved it). What is not easy is convincing the nerds around the table who’d think this isn’t cool. These guys think it is cool to tell you there are 247,000 results for your search (and ten ways to sort the results), free-shipping is available for some articles and not for others, cash-on-delivery has a minimum limit, T&Cs apply on all these and the personalization engine knows there’s no history for you but is still trying to do a good job and therefore throwing junk at you. Remember the movie-sequences with the waiter asking too many questions, and the customer ends up ordering nothing?