Designing for B2B is No Different From Designing for B2C
August 25th, 2006
Recently, UIEtips subscriber Vince wrote:
“It’s nice to see usability research for consumer-oriented sites , but since we focus on a B2B audience (and solely on the IT B2B audience), I’d like to find studies focusing on this group of people.”
I don’t think Vince is going to find what he’s looking for, primarily because, in my opinion, it doesn’t make a difference.
One of the great myths of the web is there is a difference between business-to-consumer (B2C) sites and business-to-business (B2B) sites. But, having looked into this for the last ten years, we can conclusively say you won’t find any difference in how people behave on one site or the other.
This is because, whether interacting with B2C or B2B, it’s still an individual person doing the interacting. And people are people. They don’t change their behaviors when they are doing something work-related than when they are doing something personal.
One difference people frequently tell me is: “A consumer is shopping for themselves, able to make their own decisions, and a business shopper is shopping for the organization and has to get approval. It’s not the same shopping process. So the designs need to be different.”
The underlying assumption of this challenge is there’s only one type of consumer purchasing context and there’s only one type of B2B purchasing context. That’s simply not true. Having spent much of the last few years watching people buy everything online from CDs to digital cameras to pajamas to refrigerators, I can tell you there’s dozen of shopping contexts.
For example, the way someone reorders a 25lb bag of Iams Cat Food online isn’t a whole lot different than the way a buyer reorders 3,000 bolts for their manufacturing line. Both shoppers knows what they want and they just need to specify an item and place the order.
And the way a family researches which new car to buy isn’t particularly different than the way an IT manager might choose an enterprise database solution. They both need to the designs to give them the information to inform themselves and to inform the others who might be involved in the approval process.
But, buying cat food is very different than researching a car purchase. And reordering bolts is very different than researching database technology.
True, someone who has no authority in a business has to then ask permission (thereby needing support materials to persuade the decision maker to choose the right thing), but not everyone in business is in that context. I recently read that more than 80% of businesses in the US have 15 employees or less. The owner/operators of those 80% of all businesses don’t need to ask permission. (And I’ve seen marriage relationships where the supposed “head of household” had to ask permission for everything.) So, while you can divide buyers up by whether they need approval from another party or not, it doesn’t divide up on B2C/B2B lines.
There are a ton of ways to divide and separate out users’ behaviors when interacting with the web, thereby requiring us to create designs to meet those individual needs. However, in our work, we haven’t seen any evidence that B2C and B2B is a line worth drawing. To us, it’s a meaningless distinction that really only serves to distract the design team.
August 25th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Hi Jared,
Hmmm….most of the time I pretty much agree, and certainly, from a designers & developers perspective and a usability perspective, I can see where you are coming from. But…….
Marketing Sherpa just had a pretty good case study about business to business a/b test on an offer –the orginal page was, dare I say it, more consumery less text, nice use of graphics — very easy to understand was tested against a version that had longer text, was more business to business oriented.
And the longer text, more what one would seemingly say more business to businessy won, conversions were higher.
Now, this is what blogs are all about, and we can engage in much banter, link baiting, etc, I am just sharing with you what I have read. Now, in terms of the testing I have done on sites over the course of my career, there is a difference……Let the link building begin!!
hope you are well.
Best Regards,
Mary Kay Lofurno
August 25th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Hee. I’ve been meaning to plan to blog about that MarketingSherpa study.
I think it’s a misrepresentation to say that one design is more b2b than another. In the CareerBuilder design from the study, it just says that more details and text helps users. To say that more detail makes it more B2B seems silly to me.
People want more detail, especially on home pages. This is something we’ve been saying for a while.
August 25th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Jared,
Thanks for the helpful tips. I think something else worth noting is that the traffic on certain B2B sites can be defined into specific segments or demographic groups. From my original question, I stated that our visitors are primarily technical professionals (ranging from software developers up to CIOs). With this in mind, I would assume that technically oriented people have a tendency to better understand how certain aspects of a website “work”. For example, they might use different searching techniques than non-techincal people (like binary operators or shorter phrases).
Also, when it comes to the navigation of a website, they may be able to identify more clearly where the global/sub-category navigations reside on a site and how breadcrumbs work, much quicker than someone who hasnt seen a particular type of navigation.
So, to rephrase my question a bit: Are there studies/research on different types of users interacting with various types of websites. Maybe users can be broken down into groups such as: Technical, “New To the Internet”, Business Savvy, etc.
Thanks for the replies,
-=Vince
August 25th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Hi Vince,
I wouldn’t make those assumptions at all. I’ve watched programmers who struggle with boolean search queries, and they theoretically work with boolean operators all the time.
Again, that’s not an assumption I’d make. We’ve see lots of evidence that people with more web/online/technical experience struggle just as much as people without that experience.
As Carolyn Snyder likes to say, “A poor design will always trump technical experience.” Poorly designed sites will stump the most experienced users. A well designed site will work no matter the users’ experience. So, it’s more a function of design than experience.
Of course, you need to test your site with people using it. Then you’ll know how to divide up the users. And I’d be willing to bet that technical savvyness plays very little into how people use your site.
August 27th, 2006 at 12:11 am
“But, buying cat food is very different than researching a car purchase. And reordering bolts is very different than researching database technology.”
Great point!
The complexity of the item you are buying plays a very important role. The question is what gap can the web site fill to help progress the sale? There are certain items where *some research* can be conducted using a web site, but … to really close the deal you may need to speak to a person in person or over the phone, look at a product with your own eyes and sometimes even touch the product (something the web has not be able to replace just yet