Here is a typical problem: A passenger on the sixth floor wants to descend. The closest car is on the seventh floor, but it already has three riders and has made two stops. Is it the right choice to make that car stop again? That would be the best result for the sixth-floor passenger, but it would make the other people’s rides longer.
For Ms. Christy, these are mathematical problems with no one optimum solution. In the real world, there are so many parameters and combinations that everything changes as soon as the next rider presses a button. In a building with six elevators and 10 people trying to move between floors, there are over 60 million possible combinations—too many, she says, for the elevator’s computer to process in split seconds.
As far as I can tell, small businesses viewed Groupons largely as the former: you give away your product near cost, and gain new customers from Groupon’s huge mailing list.
Anecdotally, Groupon’s salespeople in fact encouraged businesses to give their product away at a loss in order to attract new consumers. By lowering the cost of trying your restaurant or salon, the theory ran, you could win new business that you wouldn’t otherwise have gotten.
The problem is that for consumers, it seems mostly to have been about price discrimination; people used Groupons to buy something that they wouldn’t buy at full price. So while your Groupon deal brought in a huge stampede of new customers, those customers were either too cheap, or too poor to spend a bunch of money at your business. Restaurants, who were supposed to be one of the core businesses for daily deals, complained that Groupon customers were disproportionately poor tippers who took up tables while carefully not spending any more than the face value of the Groupon–no drinks, no dessert. Then they never came back.
Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” says Showalter. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to.”
Their success was in their ability to find out what works, not their ability to get it right the first time.
L. Gordon Crovitz on what “big data” has wrought: “Voters need to develop buyer-beware habits. The era of politicians saying the same thing to all voters is over. Campaigns aim to tell voters exactly what each wants to hear: data-driven pandering.”
Friction can be described as anything that causes psychological resistance to a given element on a web page. And if you took a good look at your online donation page, you’ll find it is riddled with it. This entertaining workshop will help you to identify the donation-killing friction on your web site and implement strategies to limit it.