Beware of software programs that think like machines and not like people: Day 19

by Phyllis Zimbler Miller on June 19, 2009

Reprinted from a blog post of Phyllis Zimbler Miller as a National Internet Business Examiner.

When you are setting up an information product launch that requires different software programs to work together, it’s important to remember that you are dealing with what I call “machine think.’

As you may recall, in my post of June 9th I talked about the bundled offer I had decided to create:

People signing up in July for the Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program would get for free an ebook of this entire month’s posts on launching an information product. Then starting August 1st the ebook would sell for $19.95 on the MillerMosaicLLC.com site.

Now here’s how the integration of our shopping cart software and our membership software works:

As soon as a person makes the payment through the shopping cart software, the person is suppose to be taken to the registration page for the membership site.

But because I had bundled a digital download product – the ebook – with the membership fee, the shopping cart software did what it was programmed to do. It inserted a step into the process and first took a person who had just paid to a new page to download the ebook.

In small letters below that ebook download link appeared the sentence: Once you have completed your downloads, please click here to complete your order.

I realized that this was totally unacceptable because people would download the ebook and then miss the link to the registration page. Then this would cause lots of emails asking where was the registration page.

Employing “people think,” I thought about how the Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program is a membership program. This means that getting to the registration page after paying is the most important action for the new member. The download can wait a minute or two.

Thus I went back into the shopping cart software and removed the bundled offer, leaving the membership product by itself. This then automatically removed the ebook download page from the process and took a new member directly to the registration page.

Plus to make sure we don’t disappoint anyone, even for a minute or two, we added the information at the top of the registration page that, as soon as the registration is filled out, the person would get access to the ebook download.

Why have I gone into such detail on what it appears to be a minor detail?

Because it is not a minor detail. If I had left the bundled offer in the shopping cart I would have risked confusing many people.

One of the main tenets of the Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program is NOT to overwhelm people but instead to make things easy to understand. And this is why it was very important to make the immediate experience after paying for the membership program a pleasant experience and NOT a frustrating one.

The moral of this story? Whenever you create a process for customers/clients, put yourself in their point of view. Realize that they don’t know what you know – and figure out what they need to know/do to smoothly accomplish the “next steps.”

Sometimes focusing on the customer’s/client’s point of view will require finding a way around “machine think” – and your customers/clients will appreciate the “people think” process.

And what else has been going on?

• Yael and I attended a get-together of LA Examiners and National Examiners who live in LA, and we met some very interesting people. One point that we were all in agreement about was that the backend of the Examiner.com software needs to be improved. (In fact, the backend is an example of something engineered for “machine think” rather than “people think.”)

• And if you’re a book author or plan to be a book author, check out Yael’s June 19th guest post on Tony Eldridge’s Marketing Tips for Authors blog: “What You Should Know About Web Design for Books”

http://www.1shoppingcart.com