Customer Intentions

Why Designing for Customer Intentions is the Future of Business

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Sign that reads "come in we're open"
Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash

Summary: Customers pay attention in many different ways, and it is up to them how they use said attention. Businesses need to cater to this fact or else suffer the consequences.

In the first post of this series on Designing for Intention, I introduced the need for businesses to change the way they decide on, and structure, the information they include on their websites, apps, and digital products. (It should be noted that deciding on information and communication for ANY product or service should tie back to customer intentions, but for the purposes of this discussion we’ll focus on the digital realm.)

I also stated that currently too many businesses, when including information in their digital mediums, only house information and content their business needs and wants, instead of showcasing more information which aligns their business values and their customers’ intentions for conducting business with them in the first place.

Said more simply. Businesses talk far too much about themselves instead of focusing on helping customer reach their goals.

One topic I introduced, but didn’t delve deeply into, was my thoughts and evidence around WHY I claim businesses need to make a change and design their information for customer intentions. In this piece, I aim to do just that.

We start the argument with a discussion on customer attention. An arena all businesses, especially those who either sell their products digitally (i.e. selling physical products through a website) or who sell digital products (i.e. selling a subscription to an application), compete in is that of earning and securing customer attention.

Customer attention, more generally human attention, is a tricky thing. We often think of it as two dimensional; either you have someone’s attention or you don’t. But, there are more than two modes of customer attention businesses need take into account when considering their customers.

I’ll provide a quick synopsis here:

One scale of attention is that of voluntary versus captive attention.1 Voluntary attention is the type a person pays to things they “find innately interesting. These are items you’d focus on even if explicitly forbidden.” On the other hand, captive attention “is thrust upon you”.

A second scale of attention is that of aversive versus attractive attention. People pay aversive attention to items to “avoid negative consequences”. They pay attractive attention to items because they believe whatever they are paying attention to may bring on positive experiences.

A third scale of attention is that of front-of-mind versus back-of-mind attention. Front-of-mind attention is conscious, focused, and explicit. People use this type of attention to write reports, pay taxes, and have a conversation. Back-of-mind attention is tied to “things that may never come into your conscious awareness unless something unexpected appears”. People use this type of attention when driving but paying more attention to a side conversation instead.

Hopefully you can see that when a customer is using your website, application, or other product, they could be applying, or not applying, any of these types of attention. Couple these dynamics with that of human brain function, and you’ll see there’s a lot more going on in the head of your customer than you may be giving credit for.

In a recent article2 aimed at discussing, and disproving, the myth that customer attention spans are decreasing given the increase of technology, several quotes showcase this human brain function piece.

First is this one by Dr. Briggs, “How we apply our attention to different tasks depends very much about what the individual brings to that situation”.

Meaning, your customer may come to your website one day with a certain set of life experiences behind them (maybe it was a calm day), and then arrive the next with a completely different set (maybe they arrived stressed from a long day at work and home). You can imagine that what kind of attention they pay to your information will depend greatly on these experiences.

Another quote takes this a step further; “We’ve got a wealth of information in our heads about what normally happens in given situations, what we can expect. And those expectations and our experience directly mould what we see and how we process information in any given time.”

This means that not only are there different types of attention customers pay, and not only does their environment influence how they use these types of attention when interacting with your information, but their human brain also has a great deal of preconceived notions about how certain information and products/website should work. So, in addition to all the aforementioned points, your customers are also applying their preconceived notions to how they pay attention to your information.

As you can see, it’s not simply about putting your information out on your website, application, or product and customers understanding it. The equation is much more complex due to all the dynamics at play. To make matters even harder on you, there is one final factor to consider; maybe the most important factor.

Your customer is the one in the driver’s seat determining when and how to use their attention.

That’s right, it’s your customer’s decision, not your’s. And, your customer will make this decision based off all of the previously discussed factors, and then will pay attention only to what they want or need from your business. If they don’t see something that they want or need in the moment this decision is taking place, they will go elsewhere.

It’s that simple.

We see customers going their own way with business content all the time3. Whether in doctors’ offices or when using websites, customers make the call that benefits them.
Therefore, your business’s philosophy for deciding on and structuring the information you communicate needs to take all of these factors (types of attention, environmental influences, biological functions, etc) into account then design its information for these factors to be successful.

This is what designing your information for customer intentions does.

It’s a process for determining and communicating information that first meets customer needs, and then aligns the information to showcase your unique business values. Following this process ensures your content is captivating, attractive, and front—of-mind.

These are the qualities of customer attention you want to trigger, and you don’t do so by meeting your needs, you do so by meeting theirs.

What’s the bottom line then for you and your business?

If your business chooses not to go the route of determining and designing information for customer intentions, you will continue to overload your customers, and they will choose to go elsewhere to get their needs met.

We need no further evidence than these cases to prove my point:

If your aim is for your business to be successful and survive in this digital world, you need to secure customer attention. Updating how you choose and design information from focusing on you to focusing on your customers is the key to earning this attention.

By considering then designing for customer intentions, you move from yelling information about your business at your customers to having a conversation that satisfies their needs and meets yours. Not only is this more morally sound, but it’s a foolproof way to secure happy customers who keep returning to your business to get their needs met.

The best part is all making this change requires is you putting your business ego aside and bringing your customer’s views to the forefront.

Surely the ends, a successful, long-term business, justify those means.

Customer Intentions vs Jobs To Be Done

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“The plan of this world is infinite similarity and yet infinite variety.” ~ Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

In this series we introduced Designing for Customer Intentions and talked about how to Define Customer Intentions. We discussed the importance of putting your Unique Business Values First and described the practice of Putting Customer Intentions to Use. Throughout, Customer Intentions remains a subject we’ve been excited to experiment with and develop further.

It was with this excitement that a few months ago I found myself explaining the theory to a close colleague. Instead of responding with the same excitement, she countered with, “Oh I get it. That’s like Jobs to Be Done, right?”

“Jobs to be what?” I answered.

This interaction led me to question:

Is Designing for Customer Intentions really just a replica of the Jobs to Be Done method?

I swallowed my embarrassment, opened Google, and attempted an answer.

For those of you like me who haven’t yet run into Jobs to Be Done (JTBD), it’s a method which became famous through the 1997 Clayton Christensen book, The Innovator’s Solution. I haven’t yet read the text, but through my research I found a few summaries helpful in explaining JTBD further.

To elaborate, the Jobs To Be Done theory basically says that any company which describes itself as “technology X for demographic segment Y” is eventually doomed. If you tie yourself too closely to a technology, you’ll get blindsided by the next big thing. Similarly, if you define your customers by their demographic attributes, you learn very little about how you can help them better. On the other hand, if you get under the lid of the jobs they are trying to do, and understand their Psychology – i.e. their needs, goals and mental models around these jobs – then you’ve defined the problem in a way that brings the solution into focus, and it isn’t tied to a particular technology or approach. ~ User Experience and Jobs To Be Done, Harry Brignull

It’s a straightforward principle: people “hire” products and services to get a job done. For instance, you might hire a new suit to make you look good at a job interview. Or, you hire Facebook to stay in touch with friends on a daily basis. You could also hire a chocolate bar to relieve stress. These are all jobs to be done. ~ A Practical Model for Jobs To Be Done (JTBD), Jim Kalbach

These sources and a few others began to illuminate the JTBD world for me. They also helped relate the concept back to Information Architecture and User Experience Design. I highly recommend reading these works further if you’re interested in applying them to your own business and/or practice.

After my research, I could see how the idea of a product or service being “hired” to do a job for a customer sounds similar to:

“Focusing on customer intentions starts with considering what customers intend to accomplish when interacting with a website.”

I could clearly visualize how one could consider the website a service the customer hires to get one to many jobs done.

Still, I fought giving in to the idea that the methods are the same. I read article after article to prove my intended narratives; i.e. “Customer Intentions is based more on the actual customer, whereas JTBD only focuses on products”, “Customer Intentions has a deeper emotional angle than JTBD”, and “JTBD can only be used for simple feature and task definition whereas customer intentions can be used for larger strategic initiatives”. Unfortunately for me all of my resistance was for not once I landed on this piece.

Reading it, I saw my battle was lost.

Designing for Customer Intentions and Jobs to Be Done are in fact almost one in the same. I’d say they are the same, but the Intentions theory isn’t nearly as robust as JTBD so I won’t pretend they are equivalent.

However, I won’t stop using the Intentions language anytime soon either. Nor will I stop utilizing and developing the theory further.

Why?

I hypothesize using the Customer Intentions language may be better in some scenarios, while Jobs to Be Done may be more effective in others. For example, some business partners may respond better to JTBD language especially if they are familiar with, and have already bought into, the method. Others may be more favorable of the Customer Intentions language due to it’s direct tie to customers.

I have further theories on when these cases may apply and a few data points to back up said theories, but I’m afraid these aren’t yet ready for center stage. Though, I do plan on sharing them as we gather more evidence.

As to why I don’t plan on ceasing my exploration of the theory, I believe that in seeing the theory through just a bit a further, the potential of new insights may arise. I’ll be sure to keep you updated in this regard as well.

For now, I aim to continue my research as well as focusing the language I use for the method based on both the Customers I’m working with and the Context in which we are working. An idea which I’m sure rings a bell with you other Information Architects out there.

Image Source

After-all if the language we use can serve our customers better, why not make it more specific and tailored to their needs? We could even look at the language as a product or service that does a job for the customer.

Too soon?

Maybe. Either way, I’m grateful for my colleague pointing out these similarities when she did. Without her insight, I’d still be in the dark on a theory that holds much promise and exploration in the weeks and months ahead. Stay tuned!

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Putting Customer Intentions to Use

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Our journey through understanding designing for customer intentions, defining said intentions, and communicating unique business values has hopefully been informative. However, despite whatever knowledge you may have gleaned I’m sure one question still remains:

Once you have customer intentions defined, how do you put those intentions to use?

There are a myriad of ways one could and should use intentions when designing their website. In what follows I’ll share a few of the ways we apply intentions in our work. I do so simply for inspiration’s sake, as I encourage you to use intentions however and wherever you can. After-all, you’re in business to make your customers lives better. One surefire way to do so is to ease their path to success by designing a website that’s aimed at helping them satisfy their intentions.

More on that another time. For now, let’s talk answers.

For these answers let’s bring back the example Customer Intentions list defined earlier in the series:

When a customer goes to the website they intend to…

  1. Buy an item
  2. Stay up to date
  3. Understand what (our business) makes
  4. Understand what (our business) does
  5. Find a retailer
  6. Investigate / research a better solution
  7. Return a product
  8. Get questions answered

Allow me to walk you through some example exercises and outputs we’d create using this list. I’ll start with the most abstract/strategic exercises, then work down to the concrete/detailed.

1. Concept Modeling

One of the exercises we do at the start of any website project is to create a concept model. We use this model to define the overall groups of information which need to exist on the site to communicate the unique business value while satisfying customer intentions. Here is a concept model based off our list:

Example Concept Model
Example Concept Model

If you compare the list to the model you can see where intentions overlap with groups of website information. I’ve mapped this out below:

When a customer goes to the website they intend to…

  1. Buy an item – Products
  2. Stay up to date – Company
  3. Understand what (our business) makes – Products, System
  4. Understand what (our business) does – Company, System
  5. Find a retailer – Company
  6. Investigate / research a better solution – Stories, Products, System
  7. Return a product – Company, Products
  8. Get questions answered – Company

In this example, we know when coming to the site one intention the customer has is to understand what the company makes. Using intentions here means we ensure our concept model includes one to many groups (i.e. “Products”) that will contain the information necessary (i.e. a list of products) to satisfy this intention. The important point here is to be sure each intention can be mapped to a group, and all the groups map to at least one intention.

2. Content Modeling and Mapping

Another way we use intentions is when we define the details of the concept model groups. These details include the pages and content/features that will need to exist on the site. There are many detailed steps we take during this time, and below are just a few examples which show intentions usage:

Example Content Map
Example Content Map

To get to the above content map we’ve asked ourselves questions such as “If a customer intends to ‘understand what the business does and what it makes’, what type of information or features do we need to have in our groups to meet these intentions?”. The answers become a long list of content and/or features. We take this list and organize into pages to create the content map.

At the same time, we organize our long list of features and content into a content architecture spreadsheet. Example:

Example Content Architecture
Example Content Architecture

We map each page (Levels 1, 2, and 3) directly to one / many customer intentions ensuring all website content and features related to at least one intention and vice versa.

Full Disclosure: Be sure to brace yourself during this exercise as for most teams it is the moment of truth.

During this time each page of the site and each feature or piece of content that exists on a page needs tie back to satisfying one to many customer intentions. If an intention isn’t represented in a page, in the content, or in the feature list we know something needs to be added. Easy enough.

Here’s where it gets difficult. If a page, piece of content, or feature exists without a matching intention it probably isn’t needed and should be discarded. This is usually very hard for business to accept. Yet, this is the most critical piece in creating a site geared towards meeting intentions. Miss this and your business is back to throwing too much information at your customers which means your site and your unique business value re-enter the realm of confusion. This is the exact situation designing for intentions is meant to avoid.

I encourage you to stay strong and have faith in your business value and your customers’ intentions. They won’t fail you.

3. User Flows

A third way we bake intentions in is when modeling how the customer could move through the site to satisfy an intention.

Example User Flow
Example User Flow

Understanding that customers are humans who don’t move linearly through sites, we’ve been inspired to update our model. This model aims to capture the many dimensions of navigating a website. The center hexagon represents the page a user is currently viewing. Surrounding that spoke are the potential pages the user can click to based off of the content or features are available. We model out as much as needed to visualize and validate users can indeed satisfy their intentions using the pages and content we’ve defined.

4. Interaction and Interface Design

With this foundation we move forward into interaction and interface design. For us this means looking at our content map to see which pages needed to be created, looking at our content architecture to figure out what goes on each page, looking at our user flows to understand the interplay between pages, and then constructing an interaction model which serves as the template for our interface design.

We’ll then use the customer intentions list to fact check the resulting outputs. This ensures the design and development deliverables line up with the strategy we’ve defined.

5. Content

Lastly, we’re sure to keep intentions in mind when reviewing the content of the site. This means we work to check that the messaging, tone, and voice all communicate what the customer need in order to understand the unique business value, formulate their intentions, and use the website to satisfy those intentions.

In Conclusion

By now you’ve gotten a few ideas of how you can utilize the customer intentions you’ve defined to help your customers more easily meet their goals. As we’ve said time and again, working through this practice is key to increasing customer loyalty and your business’s bottom line.

Something we haven’t yet discussed is how designing for customer intentions is also key to aligning your site with how the web has shifted, and will continue to shift, the ways we humans take in information.

More on this point in our discussions to come.

Values First

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Rope coil
Photo by Matt Haggerty on Unsplash

Before I talk any more about defining and designing for customer intentions, you must know none of this talk matters if you’re not ready for your business’s website to clearly communicate your unique business values with every word, image, interaction, and feature it contains. This may seem obvious, but I assure you it is not common practice.

In fact, the behavior I more often see is businesses replicating parts of other businesses’ websites. They try to mimic other websites’ structures, interactions, and features, assuming that by doing so they will see similar business success. What they don’t see is by replicating these items, they choose to use their website to communicate the values of other businesses, as opposed to their own.

Why do businesses choose this path? I tend to go with the evolution angle to validate the reasoning. One of the scariest things in the world for us humans is to find ourselves alone. Being alone makes us vulnerable and being vulnerable opens us up to defeat. This is why we tend to band together with others, or why we follow the lead of other more successful people. Doing so seems a better assurance of our own survival and of making sure we stay alive long enough to prosper.

The same can be said for businesses. After-all, they are made up of humans. I think this fear of vulnerability and being exposed is probably why many tend to mirror certain facets of other more successful or well-known businesses. They believe by doing so, they are more likely to find their own business success, and nowhere does this seem more easy that on the web.

There are countless examples of a business taking endless hours to prepare their offline brand, product, or service offerings to be unique and provide competitive advantage, but when it comes time to put their offerings online, competitive advantage goes out the window. Instead of trying to design their website specifically for their offerings and their values, they say things like “I want the homepage to be like .”

Many times, these statements can be helpful in directing the tone of the site. However, when businesses simply copy the features of other websites thinking this will equate to their own online success, they are missing the point.

Your website is not just a place where people can find information about your business or where they can buy your products and services. Your website is the online version of your business. Therefore, it needs to reflect your unique business values in every way possible. This includes words and pictures, yes, but it also includes the way your menus work or the way you organize all the information. Each and every decision you make needs to be a reflection of your unique business values and needs, and sometimes this means making decisions which go against what all the other other more successful or businesses are doing online.

Making these decisions is where the fear comes in.

Due to the large number of business websites out there who are copying each other, it can be pretty intimidating to choose to go against the grain. We’re humans, right? We believe there is strength in numbers. We believe more numbers ensure our survival.

The fact is there is only one business like yours, and your business values alone are why people do, and keep doing, business with you. Defining customer intentions is for not, if people don’t know who you are, and there is no way for them to know who you are, if you are defining your online presence by copying other businesses.

The mantra of “A lot of other companies designed their website this way, so it must be the best way” won’t stand, especially not in this brave new world. Why? Because the companies whose websites are successful, the ones that all the other businesses are copying, aren’t being anyone else online but themselves. They don’t care how anyone else is doing it. They do it their way.

By you treating your business website as a reflection of your business’s unique values, and displaying those values in all that your website does and says, your customers can know your business and what it stands for within seconds of visiting.

It’s only after they know this, that they’ll be able to set intentions that you can design to exceed.

Defining Customer Intentions

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“Let your intentions create your methods, and not the other way around.” ~ Peter McWilliams

Now that you’ve been introduced to the idea of updating your website by Designing for Intention, you may be wondering what exactly is meant by the term “Customer Intention.” Further, you may be curious as to how you can get started bringing this type of thinking, and this methodology, into your business. One way to get the ball rolling is to start defining customer intentions for your website.

Before we talk about defining customer intentions, allow me to explain what I mean by the term “Customer Intention”. A Customer Intention is simply: a task a customer aims to complete when coming to a website. It may seem self-explanatory. In fact, it is. However, as you’ll see later on, the term can very often be misunderstood.

When going on to define customer intentions for your website, there is no way around it, you have to start by talking to your most loyal customers. This is truly the key to determining not only customer intentions, but many other facets of customer loyalty.

In regards to intentions, the key information from these conversations you’ll unearth include an understanding of how and when customers interact with your business (i.e. their touch points), and, more importantly, why they interact with each of these touch points. (For example, maybe you find out customers go online to gather research about your products, but they buy brick and mortar because of the customer service.)

After the conversations have concluded, you’ll need to gather and list out all of the website specific Whens, Hows and Whys. Once you’ve listed them, you’ll summarize the list into clear, mutually exclusive, bullet points which each finish the sentence “When a customer goes to the website they intend to…”.

It’s a simple list really. Here is an example we recently created for an e-commerce team redesigning their Dotcom site.

Customer Intentions for the Website

When a customer goes to website they intend to…

  1. Buy an item
  2. Stay up to date
  3. Understand what makes
  4. Understand what does
  5. Find a retailer
  6. Investigate / research a better solution
  7. Return a product
  8. Get questions answered

The list seems pretty straightforward, right? Of course this is what customers go to an e-commerce site for. But, be warned! Getting to the list above isn’t as easy as it may seem. Below is an example of what the list probably looked like before the team checked it against findings from conversations they had with loyal customers:

Customer Intentions for the Website — What Could Have Been

When a customer goes to website they intend to…

  1. Buy an item
  2. Sign up for the Newsletter
  3. Visit the Blog
  4. Update Account Information
  5. Find a retailer
  6. Investigate / research a better solution
  7. Return a product
  8. Get questions answered

Notice something different? Check out the bold items in the second list. Notice how subjective and feature specific they are.

It is highly likely you are going to try to put items like “Sign Up for the Newsletter” on your list. This is normal as often times business owners try to squeeze in feature specific items which represent the parts of the website they wish people were coming online to access, instead of being honest about why customers are really going to their site.

This is why it’s important to talk to your most loyal customers. There’s no disputing actually hearing these intentions first hand. Without this insight, your list will undoubtedly lean towards satisfying business goals, which means your website will be designed for business intention rather than customer intention. This means the odds of your website fostering customer loyalty go way, way down.

Knowing this, your final step is to review and edit your list with an eye toward, and an urge for, actual customer insights and extreme honesty. Your goal should be to keep your list of intentions as objective and non-feature specific as possible. How do you know you’ve done it right?

Ultimately, if your list of customer intentions reflects what you heard in your research, and, makes you a little (or a lot) uncomfortable, you know you’ve defined it well.

Once you have created an honest list of Customer Intentions, you’ve started the process of making your website a place that can assist in cultivating customer loyalty, instead of a place where you inundate customers with information you hope they pay attention to.

What’s next after you have the list defined? You can begin to design a user experience that meets, and hopefully exceeds, Customer Intentions, of course. And, you can be sure there is more information on doing so to come.

Designing for Intention

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In today’s business world having a website is practically equivalent to being in business. There is no question in regards to IF your business should have a website. There is, however, still very much a question in regards to how best to structure and position that website and the information it contains for maximum business and customer benefit.

As an Information Architect, it is my job to help businesses understand purpose. More importantly, it is my job to help others understand how to structure specific information on their websites (and apps, and anything else that has information that needs to be communicated) to meet that purpose.

Recently, we have developed some interesting viewpoints in this endeavor. Before I share those with you, it is important to understand what I mean by the term “structuring a website.” It is also important to understand a bit more about how and why websites are structured today.

Back when the web was first born, there was no rhyme or reason to what information was strewed across it. As more and more information was put on the web (NOTE: By the word “information” I mean content, videos, images… anything.), it became harder for people to find their way around. People not finding their way around meant that they weren’t able to connect with businesses in the ways they needed to become customers, let alone loyal customers. This not only frustrated users, but it was also not so good for business.

This issue birthed the field of Information Architecture. Started in large part by those who studied and worked in Library Sciences, Information Architecture was created in order to help organize all the information that was floating about on the Internet. Since then, Information Architects have been helping businesses figure out which information needs to go where on their websites. They have also been helping to organize and structure said information into nice, neat taxonomies. These taxonomies work to catalog each piece of a company’s information so it can easily be found on the web.

You may have worked with one of these people before, and evidence of their hard work is everywhere. One of the most popular examples, as of late, is the mega menu. Here are some screenshots of the mega menu in use:

Patagonia’s mega menu
Patagonia’s mega menu.

Amazon's mega menu
Amazon’s mega menu.

These menus are organized to give each piece of a company’s information a “home” in the hopes that customers will seek out and find what they need.

There’s just one problem with these sites, and most other sites regardless if they have a mega menu.

Expedia.com menu
Expedia is an example of a site without a mega menu, but with a large amount of menu items still showing.

These structures don’t allow the sites to be optimized for their necessary purpose. Instead of helping customers to meet their goals, the structure of the website is actually creating more noise for customers to sift through, which is bad for the bottom line because customers aren’t able to find the information they need in order to complete the transaction.

This brings us back to the customer’s intention.

Focusing on customer intention starts with considering what customers intend to accomplish interacting with a website. Instead of doing things the old way, i.e. designing a site by starting with all the information a company wants to put on their website and organizing a structure around it, we first think about the customer’s intent.

With these intentions in mind, we can then sort through all of the information the company has that can fulfill those intentions. This is ultimately the totality of the information that will live on the website. Being sure to leave out any extraneous company information that simply adds noise to the equation. Because, after-all, the last thing a customer needs in today’s world is MORE information thrown at them.

Structuring for intention is one of the very first steps needed in order to aim your website toward cultivating customer loyalty. The above looks to provide the basic outline of a much grander idea. There is a lot more to the process to share, and you can be sure that I will be doing so soon.

But for now, it’s important for us all to realize that the old way of thinking about what information goes on our websites and how that information is organized no longer works. Yes indeed, it’s time for a change.