[Sigia-l] movie of the month muddle

[Chris Chandler]

Katherine,

I apologize for responding late -- I'm sure the situation has changed already!

The first real problem is how to persuade your client that your solution is the right one. First of all, it doesn't
contradict their business model at all. Their business model seems to be to allow people to buy one-offs, but push
subscriptions. This is exactly what you propose.

You may be able to communicate your thoughts with a very simple model: How much easier does your design make it to
purchase one-offs vs. the current site -- i.e. will your design push that 5% number higher? If it does push that number
higher, how many of those people are likely to go for the upsell? It would be helpful to know as much as possible about
what is motivating those one-off purchasers. It also may not be bad to push that number higher, if the overall numbers
improve.

You can contrast this with estimates of how much business will be lost by the obviously confusing and frustrating flow
you describe next, although this is risky, since no one ever wants to tell the client this kind of truth. You can
certainly contrast that broken flow with many best-of-breed example, and/or the flow from major competitors. My advice
is to do this visually with screen shots and powerpoint.

You should tie your analysis to basic metrics -- this is what we expect, and this is how you'll know if we were right,
e.g. large numbers of abandonment's at this page, lower one-off purchase numbers over all and as a percentage of total
sales (assuming pessimistically that the client will make you do it their way!!)

The second issue is that your technical team either doesn't know what it's talking about, or isn't telling you the whole
truth. As Ziya remarked, the task you describe is trivial and commonplace. Now, it may be that it would involve a change
in the already planned design that might not be "worth it," but you'd have to be pretty far into development for me to
think that was the case.

The real question is how far are you willing to push this issue? You can talk with other developers -- ("so-and-so says
this is flow is IMPOSSIBLE, do you agree?" is a tried and true lead-in), talk with the head of development, post your
question to a web development forum, call your local microsft sales rep, or just plain look around to find other sites
or case studies using MCS that do what you want.

Good luck, and do let us know how it turns out!

-cc



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Katherine Lumb" <KLumb at semaphorepartners.com>
To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 7:22 AM
Subject: [Sigia-l] movie of the month muddle


I'm hoping you all can help me out with a tough situation.

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