Sometimes you just get it wrong, and in this instance by God were we wrong.
Letting visitors create a shortlist of clinics they were interested in comparing and contacting was a feature we’d been discussing almost since the beginning of the company. It would come up for discussion every couple of months and eventually we got so fed up talking about it we decided to just try it out.
As features go it was pretty simple. All we needed was a link added to each clinic’s search result, one in their profile, and a page to display the visitor’s chosen shortlist. We thought it was a good idea that would be useful to our visitors.
This obviously wasn’t an original idea, and there were plenty of sites that had implemented similar features we could look to for some inspiration. Kayak.com and HostelWorld.com both had directly comparable features, and we also looked at shopping carts on ecommerce sites as well as light boxes on photograph websites.
We planned and rolled out the feature within a week and sat back waiting to see a truckload of visitors happily creating shortlists and coming back to them to compare their options.
That wasn’t exactly what happened.
The Result
We were able to get a pretty good picture in a very short space of time as we have a lot of traffic coming to site. Things weren’t looking good after an hour, and after a full day it became clear that close to no one was using the feature.
We’d had 22,000 visitors over the course of that 24 hour period and only 80 people (0.3%) had added any clinics to their short list. To make matters worse only 17 of those people (0.08%) had subsequently gone back and viewed their short list.
We decided to enter EMERGENCY FEATURE RESCUE MODE. Everyone in the office had their own opinion as to why it wasn’t working. These included:
- The call to action – ‘Add to Shortlist’ wasn’t immediately understandable
- People could not see the call to action link
- It was a crap feature
We changed the call to action text to “Save this Clinic”, pushed it out and waited…
101 people added a clinic to their shortlist on day two. Now normally an uplift of 25% in usage is a cause for celebration. However, when only 0.4% of your visitors want to use a feature it can only mean one thing: turn it off.
So that’s what we did. Two days after launching a feature that we had great hopes for it ended up in the trash can.
Sometimes you just have to work harder on a feature, refining it over time to increase its usage, and other times you just have to accept that you were wrong in the first place and bin the idea. In this instance we figured that no end of finessing was going to create a feature that resonated with our visitors.
Not All In Vain
Over the last three years we’ve gotten pretty used to the idea of launching features that don’t get adopted. A lot of people would look at the effort that we put into these feature as a waste of time but that is not the way we think about it.
Every feature that we decide to develop we regard as a learning exercise. The purpose isn’t to create a fantastic feature; the purpose is to learn something new about our visitors. If you build something and it doesn’t add to the overall knowledge of the company then you’ve missed the lion’s share of the value.
To make this possible we have learned code as lightweight as possible and our processes are now fairly efficient. When we roll out a new feature now we try to expend as little effort as possible getting it to the stage that we can test whether the basic premise is viable or not. Once we decide it is viable we go ahead and refine and improve it.
What was the worst feature you ever rolled out, and how long did you leave it run for? Share your experiences in the comments below.
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