User interface

January 18, 2011

How To Build Online Experiences
Of The Future
by Moira Dorsey
for Customer Experience Professionals

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

For Customer Experience Professionals

January 18, 2011
How To Build Online Experiences Of The Future
Best Practices From Firms That Created Experiences With CARS Attributes
by Moira Dorsey
with Harley Manning, Richard Gans, and Jennifer Peterson

Exec ut i v e S u mma ry
Forrester believes that four attributes will characterize the next phase of development of the web. Online
experiences will be: customized by the end user, aggregated at the point of use, relevant to the moment,
and social as a rule, not an exception (CARS). For this report, we spoke with customer experience
professionals who have already launched these types of online experiences. Our research revealed that
there are four keys to designing, launching, and delivering successful CARS experiences: 1) start with
consumers, not capabilities; 2) make aggregation central to your strategy; 3) turn your IT partners into
your new best friends; and 4) introduce innovations with care.

tabl e of Co n te n ts N OT E S & RE S O URCE S
2 Online Experiences Will Be Customized, Forrester interviewed eight vendor and user
Aggregated, Relevant, And Social companies, including Big in Japan, FedEx,
3 Innovators Share Four Keys To Building Fidelity, InsideTrip, Livekick, Mobilizy, USAA, and
Successful CARS Experiences Yellow Book.
Start With Consumers, Not Capabilities
Related Research Documents
Make Aggregation Central To Your Strategy “Best Practices For Launching Site Redesigns”
Turn Your IT Partners Into Your New Best June 23, 2010
Friends
“The Future Of Online Customer Experiences”
Introduce Innovations With Care January 28, 2010
recommendations
“Match iPhone Capabilities To Customer Goals”
14 Anticipate The Unexpected To Ensure Success
January 23, 2009
With New Online Experiences
16 Supplemental Material

© 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRankings, and Total Economic
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based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

2 How To Build Online Experiences Of The Future

Online Experiences Will Be Customized, Aggregated, Relevant, and Social
A little more than a year ago, Forrester predicted that online experiences were on the brink of a new
era.1 The transformation is already underway, driven by rapid changes in technology capabilities,
consumers’ online behavior, and increasing competition (see Figure 1). We concluded that trends in
these areas would drive online experiences to be increasingly (see Figure 2):

· Customized by the end user. Consumers will control not only what they get online but also the
form in which they get it to a much greater degree than they do today.

· Aggregated at the point of use. Content, function, and data will be pulled from different
sources and organizations and combined at a common destination to create a unique experience.

· Relevant to the moment. This customized, aggregated content will appear on the devices, sites,
apps, and widgets best suited to the customer’s context at a given point in time.

· Social as a rule, not an exception. Social content will be integrated into most online
experiences, not just segregated in today’s blogs, microblogs, wikis, or community sites.

Figure 1 The Three C’s Are Driving Changes In Future Online Customer Experiences

Forrester believes that future online customer experiences will be driven by rapid changes in three areas:

Capabilities Changing technology Today’s default platform — a browser running on a PC — will
platforms rapidly give way to a host of highly diverse environments.

Consumers Evolving online These new capabilities get a warm reception from a
behavior marketplace that’s hungry for innovation.

Competition Millions of new Information providers ranging from large companies to
entrants prolific individuals flood the Internet with a tsunami of online
information targeted at increasingly wired consumers.

57903 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

January 18, 2011 © 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

How To Build Online Experiences Of The Future 3

Figure 2 Consumers Embrace CARS Experiences

With widgets and apps, consumers now customize all browser types plus desktops,
ustomized smartphones, and TVs.

The top 10 most-trafficked Web sites aggregate content from multiple sources.*
ggregated

Smart devices are game changers: Mobile shoppers spent $2 billion on eBay in
elevant 2010.†

Consumer opinions posted online are now the most trusted source of advertising.‡
ocial

*Source: TNS Compete
†
Source: eBay
‡
Source: Nielsen

Innovators Share four keys to building successful CARS experiences
We interviewed customer experience professionals who have developed innovative CARS
experiences for their firms (see Figure 3). Our research revealed that there are four keys to designing,
launching, and delivering successful CARS experiences:

1. Start with consumers, not capabilities. All of the successful CARS projects we heard about
started by identifying consumer needs. Understanding those needs allowed the companies to
innovate with a clear sense of direction and priorities.

2. Make aggregation central to your strategy. The ability to aggregate and be aggregated is the
critical dependency for making online experiences relevant and social. Customer experience
professionals need to create new offerings with the explicit intention of sharing content both
internally and externally.

3. Turn your IT partners into your new best friends. Successful CARS projects include
developers as core team members. Developers often contribute to strategy and design as well as
technical implementation.

4. Introduce innovations with care. An innovation is “the introduction of something new.”2 But
new things — even when they’re big improvements — often meet resistance.3 Our interviewees
offered advice on how to successfully introduce CARS experiences to important stakeholders
like executives and customers.

© 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited January 18, 2011


Figure 3 Interviewed Firms Developed Innovative CARS Experiences

Customized Aggregated Relevant Social
Big in Japan Users of the company’s ShopSavvy pulls ShopSavvy is available Users can view
ShopSavvy app scan a pricing information on iPhone, Android, customer ratings
product with their from multiple retailer Nokia, and Windows and reviews of
phone’s camera. The databases and directly phones. products and add and
app returns pricing from users. It compiles edit product data.
information at local driving directions, Users can add/share
and online stores. addresses, and phone reviews, prices,
Shoppers can numbers for local pictures — and the
save results to a retailers that stock best deals.
wish list and set price desired items.
alerts.
FedEx My FedEx lets users FedEx Desktop An iPhone app
customize their views aggregates tracking updates customers on
by allowing data to a user’s package delivery
information modules desktop to provide status.
to be shown/hidden up-to-date shipping
as seen fit. status.
Fidelity Articles from Customers can The online team
Investments SmartMoney and manage their reaches out to
other sources appear accounts and trade customers and
alongside original with iPhone and iPad prospects via
content on apps. Facebook and Twitter.
fidelity.com.
InsideTrip Users can search for InsideTrip compiles
flights based on the flight information
options that are most from multiple travel
important to them databases.
(e.g., on-time
performance and
legroom).




Figure 3 Interviewed Firms Developed Innovative CARS Experiences (Cont.)

Customized Aggregated Relevant Social
Livekick Users can list their Livekick brings Users can receive Users can share
favorite artists or have together information updates on local information about
Livekick pull lists from from multiple sources concerts from their concerts via
their favorite music to help users find local favorite artists via calendaring and
apps (e.g., iTunes, concerts for their touchpoints like social apps. The site
Pandora). favorite artists and email, Twitter, RSS links to artist info on
the best ticket prices readers, widgets, and MySpace and
for the concerts they iPhones. Wikipedia.
want to attend.
Mobilizy The firm’s Wikitude Wikitude uses location- For tourists, landmark Information about
app provides users based data to pull up information is available landmarks is drawn
with information information about on the relevant mobile from Wikipedia.
about landmarks in landmarks in their device.
their surroundings. surroundings from
Wikipedia.
USAA Members can get a On the site, members Deposit@Mobile lets Members can rate and
personalized budget can see all of their members deposit review financial
based on their accounts, including checks by products.
spending patterns and those held at other smartphone.
advice tailored to companies.
specific life events,
including end-to-end An iPhone app brings
support for car and together account info,
home ownership. an ATM locator, a
rental car locator, and
an accident tool kit.
Yellow Book Geographic filters cut Almost 4,000 sales Mobile apps allow User-generated
through the clutter. reps enable users to access reviews add value to
aggregation of local information on listings.
information on a Android, iPad, iPhone,
grand scale. BlackBerry, and Palm
devices.


Start With Consumers, Not Capabilities
New products fail when they don’t address user needs. To avoid launches that miss the mark, our
interviewees recommend that online customer experience professionals:

· Let the needs of customers drive innovation efforts. USAA knew that its members were
geographically dispersed, extremely mobile, and reluctant to mail checks to the few brick-
and-mortar branches available to them. However, members also tend to be early adopters of
technology. That drove USAA to create Deposit@Home, an application that allowed users to
deposit checks by scanning them and emailing the image. Using the same infrastructure, USAA
later deployed Deposit@Mobile, a smartphone app that allows users to deposit checks using the
camera on their phone instead of a scanner (see Figure 4). This app brought the remote-deposit
experience to the relevant device for members deployed around the world, letting them get
access to their money quickly without the uncertainty of mailing a check.



Figure 4 USAA iPhone App Allows Check Deposits

The web page shows USAA’s mobile app
for the iPhone.

Source: USAA website

· Create innovations that fulfill customers’ unmet needs. Fidelity treats capabilities like
aggregation as a means of serving customers needs, not an end in themselves. Ever since the
financial crisis of 2008, Fidelity’s customers have expressed a strong desire for the firm to help
them understand what they need to do, instead of just telling them what happened. In order to
layer advice on top of information, Fidelity expanded the role of the editorial staff that was
originally created to aggregate site content from sources like SmartMoney and The Wall Street
Journal. Now, when major developments occur, an editor in chief identifies an internal expert who
creates content, which is then edited and distributed for review and approval (see Figure 5). For
example, the day after the stock market bounced on May 6, 2010, Fidelity published proprietary
content that put the event in context and offered guidance on how investors should react.



Figure 5 Fidelity.com Offers Aggregated Content

Fidelity’s home page shows original
content created by Fidelity as well as
market data aggregated from other
sources.

Source: Fidelity Investments website

· Create CARS experiences that add unique value. The online team at Yellow Book saw a gap
in the market for helping users make informed decisions when looking for services, such as a
plumber or tree cutter. Searching for services is not like searching for products, where users look
for the best product they can afford. Instead, service shoppers want to find qualified providers
that have a good history of working with other users in similar situations — information that
customer reviews are perfectly suited for and that Yellow Book now provides (see Figure 6).

· Prioritize innovations and processes based on customer needs. In response to customers’
strong interest in proactive package tracking updates, FedEx created the My FedEx web
application. It allows users to view all tracking information from one central location and
personalize that experience with nicknames and custom views. Quantitative research revealed
that proactive notification of order status changes had become the highest-priority feature to



customers, leading to the creation of the FedEx Desktop widget and an iPhone application (see
Figure 7). Both apps enable customers to provide real-time feedback, which drives ongoing
prioritization of improvements. To enable quicker iterations, the team moved away from
FedEx’s waterfall development process, which required each step to be complete before the next
could begin and resulted in an 18-month development cycle. Instead, the new process allows
multiple steps to occur at the same time and results in a product that meets customer needs
much more quickly.

Figure 6 Yellow Book Lets Users Review Listed Companies

A Yellow Book web page shows
consumer ratings of regional businesses
as well as the controls that let users
share listings or begin writing a review
of a business.

Source: Yellow Book website



Figure 7 The FedEx Desktop And iPhone Apps Provide Proactive Tracking Notifications

Source: FedEx desktop and iPhone apps

· Use social experiences — both positive and negative — to drive change. Alarm bells went
off after some products averaged fewer than four stars in a five-star customer rating system
on usaa.com (see Figure 8). Some USAA employees wanted to remove the negative reviews,
but the online and social media teams argued that negative reviews were simply another way
for customers to provide feedback and request change. The company concluded that it’s more
important to focus on changing the business than to worry about the potential impact of
negative reviews on public perceptions. As a result, USAA has kept the reviews live and makes
product changes, where possible, in order to create a more positive user experience and address
member pain points. Early indicators show that the approach is working: USAA sees higher
close rates from site sales.



Figure 8 USAA’s Website Lets Consumers Rate Products

USAA’s home page features products
with consumer ratings.

Source: USAA website

Make Aggregation Central To Your Strategy
The definition of online experiences is rapidly changing from one where companies build a site that
customers visit to one where companies must deliver an experience on whichever devices, sites,
or apps their customers find relevant. In this new paradigm, our interviewees recommend that
customer experience professionals:

· Design for distribution across a multidevice, multichannel world. When USAA collected
and displayed ratings and reviews for its financial services products, it anticipated reusing the
content across devices and potentially across third-party sites. But each line of business has
“arcane” back-end systems and its own development shop to deal with them. So USAA has
turned to its internal innovation team to create a flexible services layer to accommodate the
explosion of devices, platforms, and services that are entering the market. The firm also used
selected partners to help scale its efforts, including Critical Mass for strategic design work and
Bazaarvoice for moderating reviews.



· Build back-end services that allow reuse across multiple online channels. The FedEx team
built the back-end systems for the My FedEx web application with reuse in mind. When
it subsequently built FedEx Desktop, a widget that monitors shipment status and sends
notifications, it was able to offer the same level of functionality in just five months — half the
time to create My FedEx.

· Build application programming interfaces (APIs), not apps — make the data portable.
Although counterintuitive, there are benefits to syndicating — rather than protecting — some
proprietary data so that third parties can aggregate it into their experiences. For example,
ShopSavvy collects data from hundreds of retailers. The app allows shoppers to scan a product’s
bar code and find out where they can buy it locally or online and at what prices (see Figure 9).
By doing this, it gives retailers that provide data to ShopSavvy a presence in their competitors’
stores. When ShopSavvy’s co-founder showed a chief marketing officer (CMO) a demo of the
app in one of the CMO’s own stores, the CMO agreed to provide his firm’s data after just three
scans. It was clear that when his competitors put their prices on ShopSavvy, they got to compete
with him in his own store whether he liked it or not — so he needed to be able to do the same
thing to them.

Figure 9 ShopSavvy Aggregates Data To Help Users Find The Best Price

ShopSavvy aggregates data from multiple retailers,
as well as the app’s users, and displays it on devices
that shoppers can carry when visiting retail stores.

Source: Big in Japan iPhone app



· Autocustomize and help relevant data find the user. Concert goers use Livekick to find out
when their favorite artists will be performing in their area. One of the firm’s founding concepts
is to make it easy for users to customize the service by doing most of the work for them.
Livekick’s chief executive officer (CEO) refers to this as autocustomization. Instead of forcing
users to enter their favorite artists’ names, Livekick builds a profile for them based on playlists
imported from their favorite music service like iTunes and Pandora (see Figure 10). Another
founding principle of Livekick is to bring users information based on their customization. By
enabling customization and then aggregating data from 15 events sites, the service delivers a
personalized experience that’s different every day for every user.

Figure 10 Livekick Makes It Easy For Users To Customize Their Experience

Livekick’s downloadable
widget pulls information
about users’ favorite artists
from music services like
iTunes and Pandora.

Source: Livekick website



Turn Your IT Partners Into Your New Best Friends
Our innovators all confirmed that collaboration with their colleagues in IT was key to the success of
their initiatives. Some of their specific recommendations include:

· Seek IT partners with an understanding of customer experience. The idea to upgrade the
My FedEx web application to Flex Desktop — which enabled a more customizable and rich
user experience — came from the developer on the team. He was also the first to recognize the
potential benefits of developing a tracking application for the iPhone. Since the footprint of the
desktop application is similar to that of the iPhone app from a user experience (UX) perspective,
the team was able to create the iPhone app in only two and a half months — half the time
needed to create the FedEx Desktop. In terms of business results, the iPhone app had more than
500,000 downloads within the first year.

· Co-locate designers and developers. To ensure that the design stays closely aligned with
business needs, Fidelity’s online team has built close relationships across functions. For example,
when incorporating changes to its home page and creating the iPhone app, it had people from
various departments sitting together to ensure that there was clear, spontaneous communication.
While designing the iPhone app, the mobile product manager went so far as to hang out with
the development team every day just to ensure proper levels of communication and address
issues as they came up. Ultimately, the approach paid off in decreased cycle time and improved
usability and design.

· Communicate expected experience benefits to get buy-in from IT. The yellowbook.com team
added customizable searches on yellowbook.com through the use of geographic filters. This
required a great deal of development work. The online team found that by taking the time to help
people in IT understand what they were trying to do and why, their technical colleagues viewed
the prospect of adding customization as an exciting challenge rather than an additional burden.

Introduce Innovations With Care
Change — even for the better — isn’t always welcome. To help ensure their new products would be
embraced, our interviewees encouraged other customer experience professionals to:

· Position the launch of innovative products as beta versions. When USAA launched the
Deposit@Mobile application, the experience was not initially perfect. Based on member
feedback, the project team made adjustments that fixed a core problem, demonstrating that
USAA takes member needs seriously. By positioning the release as an innovative new service
and making changes in response to user feedback, USAA lowered the risks associated with the
rollout and earned member trust. Today, members continue to provide feedback that helps
direct changes to the already-improved solution.



· Avoid forcing innovations on their users. Most of FedEx’s customers prefer a richer, more
customized experience from My FedEx. But this isn’t true for all of its users. The FedEx team
wanted to make sure that those users were not forced to accept the new version if they didn’t
want it. That’s why the team incorporated a welcome message into the HTML version of My
FedEx, giving users the option to upgrade to the “new and more powerful My FedEx” — or not.

· Favor rapid adoption over extreme innovation. USAA chose ratings and reviews as the first
social feature to add to its site. Why? With a feature that was well established in the retail world,
the USAA team knew customer ratings would be familiar to its members but still innovative
for a financial services site. This approach worked, as shown not only by higher acquisition and
conversion rates but also by the intangibles of deeper member relationships.

· Gain executive support through clear communication. The FedEx team used Flash movies
to create concept demos of how My FedEx would work once it migrated to Flex. This helped
both pave the way among stakeholders and develop a prototype, which the team used to gain
executive and IT support for the project. The team also took care to socialize the changes it was
making to the development process. The team communicated the process changes to executive
management, along with the steps it took to ensure nothing important was lost along the way.
This eased concerns among those who worried that doing some development steps in parallel
would add risk.

Recomme n d a t i o n s

Anticipate the unexpected to ensure success with new online experiences
Our interviews revealed that designing, developing, and launching successful CARS online
experiences also requires a willingness to embrace approaches that go against conventional
wisdom, processes, and practices.

· Give users more power but less complexity. Providing users with the most content
and functionality relevant to their goal isn’t the path to providing a differentiated online
experience. Putting the most relevant content and function at a user’s fingertips and making
it easy to find and engage with is. InsideTrip enables shoppers to customize their search
based on criteria that are the most important to their needs, whether it’s traveling alone
for business or taking an entire family on vacation. On the front end, users see a coherent
view of their options, including comparisons of on-time performance, seat legroom,
aircraft age, and lost-bag rankings. This elegant simplicity is enabled on the back end by
InsideTrip’s complex, custom-built relational database that imports data in a variety of
incompatible formats and then integrates it seamlessly. Similarly, because music sites display
their information in myriad inconsistent formats, LiveKick has a layer in its database that
normalizes data such as events that have four or five different names depending on which
venue they’re appearing in.



· Embrace the strengths and limitations of relevant touchpoints. Automated systems
and devices have strengths and weaknesses in terms of their capability to support user
activities.4 Customer experience professionals should use these strengths and weaknesses
to their advantage — offering users the capabilities they need, rather than every possible
feature, in each touchpoint. For example, the success of FedEx’s iPhone app resulted from not
requiring users to input a great deal of information — a task the device is not very good at
supporting. Currently, the FedEx iPhone app limits itself to providing users with up-to-date
tracking information, a valuable but fairly straightforward process. To add input-intensive
functionality like creating and processing shipping orders, FedEx is exploring innovative
concepts that will reduce the need for data entry. When USAA migrated Deposit@Home from
home scanners to the iPhone, its team learned that users were able to get a better image
from the iPhone due to the preformatted size of the image — the app includes gridlines that
frame the shot — and the iPhone’s superior ease of use.
· Anticipate changes to business process and technology investments. Revamping some
experiences will require customer experience professionals to push through new technology
investments as well as changes to long-standing business processes. For example, Fidelity’s
new responsiveness comes at the cost of changes to business processes and investments
in technology. First, there is the ongoing human cost of the small editorial team as well
as the time required from experts who write the articles and senior managers who review
the articles before they’re published. In terms of technical cost, Fidelity had to upgrade its
publishing platform to enable intraday posting of new content on an “as-needed” basis. This
required the purchase and upgrade of software platforms from external vendors, including
EMC Documentum. These investments won support from Fidelity executives because they
served the end goal of building stronger customer relationships by adding value to the
company’s highly trafficked website.



SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
Companies Interviewed For This Document
Big in Japan Livekick
FedEx Mobilizy
Fidelity USAA
InsideTrip Yellow Book

Endnotes
1
Forrester believes that four attributes will characterize the next phase of development of the web. Online
experiences will be: customized by the end user, aggregated at the point of use, relevant to the moment, and
social as a rule, not an exception. In January 2010, we highlighted companies that were providing online
experiences that already exhibited one or more of these characteristics. See the January 28, 2010, “The
Future Of Online Customer Experience” report.
2
Source: Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation).
3
When companies redesign sites, users’ aversion to change results in problems like spikes in call center traffic
and social media backlash. That’s because changes in site design force users to learn new interfaces and new
process flows in order to accomplish their goals. Customer experience professionals can minimize the pain of
launching a redesign by following best practices like engaging users during the design process and educating
executives on what to expect. See the June 23, 2010, “Best Practices For Launching Site Redesigns” report.
4
Instead of shrinking their desktop websites to make them accessible by mobile devices, firms are capitalizing
on the power and popularity of devices like the iPhone to create mobile-specific data experiences in
the forms of applications, websites, and integrated messaging features. But simply building these richer
experiences doesn’t ensure success. Companies looking to harness the power of these devices must design
experiences that match appropriate device capabilities with user goals. To design successful mobile data
experiences, companies must understand how people want to use mobile data channels, fit those data
channels into multichannel scenarios, and focus on their strongest capability — timeliness. See the January
23, 2009, “Match iPhone Capabilities To Customer Goals” report.


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User interface

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