The $300 Million Button

By Jared M. Spool
Originally published: Jan 14, 2009
[While Luke Wroblewski was writing his well-received book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, he asked if I could think of an example where a change in a form's design made a noticeable difference in business. "You mean like $300 million of new revenue?" I responded. "Yes, like that." said Luke. So I wrote this article, which he published in his book.]
当Luke Wroblewski正在写他那本畅销书《网页表单设计：在空格中填字》的时候，他问我有没有这么一个例子：一个表单设计的改变造就了商业上引人注目的不同。“你的意思是比如3亿美元的新收入？”我说， “对，就是那样子的！” luke回复到。于是我写了这篇已经被收录在他书中的文章

How Changing a Button Increased a Site's Annual Revenues by $300 Million
It's hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.
The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It's a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?
The problem wasn't as much about the form's layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product.
The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn't mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they'll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?

更改一个按钮是如何让网站营业额增加3亿美金的
很难想到比这更简单的表单了：2个输入框，2个按钮，1个链接。事实是这个表单正在妨碍用户从一个大型电子商务网站上付钱买东西，妨碍了多少呢？大约3亿美元一年。更糟糕的是网站的设计师根本没有觉察到有这么一个问题存在。
这个表单太简单了，输入框分别是邮箱地址和密码，按钮是登录和注册，链接是忘记密码。这是网站的登录表单，用户到处都会碰到这玩意，怎么可能有问题呢？
表单结构也许有些问题，但更严重的可能是它出现的时机。当用户在购物车中填满想要购买的商品，点击“付款”按钮的时候就会见到它。在用户基本上已经卷起袖子准备签单的时候，它蹭的蹦出来了。
团队成员认为这个表单可以让客户更快的购买东西。第一次来买东西的人不会介意花一点点时间注册——因为，以后他们还可能回来买更多的东西，他们会感谢在今后购买时的便利，所有人都得利，不是么？

"I'm Not Here To Be In a Relationship"
We conducted usability tests with people who needed to buy products from the site. We asked them to bring their shopping lists and we gave them the money to make the purchases. All they needed to do was complete the purchase.
We were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, "I'm not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something."
Some first-time shoppers couldn't remember if it was their first time, becoming frustrated as each common email and password combination failed. We were surprised how much they resisted registering.
Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalized how the retailer only wanted their information to pester them with marketing messages they didn't want. Some imagined other nefarious purposes of the obvious attempt to invade privacy. (In reality, the site asked nothing during registration that it didn't need to complete the purchase: name, shipping address, billing address, and payment information.)

“我不是为了和你们搞关系才来这里的”
我们针对那些在网站上购买产品的人们做了一场可用性测试。我们请他们购买一系列想要的商品，并提供给他们钱来支付，他们所要做的仅仅是完成整个购物流程。
在测试中我们发现之前对初次购物者的看法是错误的，他们十分在乎注册这个事情。他们十分厌恶到达这个页面就必须要注册。一位顾客对我说“我不是为了和你们搞关系才来这里的，我只想要买东西”
还有一些顾客不记得自己之前是不是来过这个网站，于是尝试输入不同的邮箱地址和密码组合，随着一次次的失败他们开始抓狂。总的来说，用户对注册的抵制程度让我们十分吃惊。
当不知道“注册”的后面包含着什么内容的时候，用户对点击那个按钮都抱着一种绝望的感觉。许多人嚎叫着说那些零售商就是想方设法收集自己的信息，好在某一天给他们发送那些邪恶的广告和促销信息，还有些人甚至觉得这整个就是一阴谋，很明显是用来侵犯个人隐私的。

Not So Good For Repeat Customers Either
Repeat customers weren't any happier. Except for a very few who remembered their login information, most stumbled on the form. They couldn't remember the email address or password they used. Remembering which email address they registered with was problematic - many had multiple email addresses or had changed them over the years.
When a shopper couldn't remember the email address and password, they'd attempt at guessing what it could be multiple times. These guesses rarely succeeded. Some would eventually ask the site to send the password to their email address, which is a problem if you can't remember which email address you initially registered with.
(Later, we did an analysis of the retailer's database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.)
The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren't helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales - a lot of sales.

让用户反复去做一件事情没有一点好处
让用户反复去做一件事情不会产生任何愉悦。除了那些极少数记得自己注册信息的人，大部分的用户都被表单绊倒了，他们不记得自己的曾用过的邮箱名称和密码。让用户记住自己注册时使用的邮箱地址本身也很有问题，因为许多人都拥有不止一个邮箱，或也许某个邮箱已经被抛弃很多年了。
当一个用户记不住邮箱地址和密码的时候，他们会进行好几次的猜测和尝试。猜测很少成功，一些人最终要求网站把密码发到他们的邮箱里，然而这也有问题，如果你记不住自己注册时使用的邮箱地址的话。
（后来，我们依据零售数据库做了一个统计，发现所有顾客中有45%的人在系统中注册了多次，一些人甚至注册了10个帐号。我们还研究了有多少顾客索取密码，发现每一天的请求量就是16万次，在这之中75%的人发送请求后就停止了购买行为。）
这个本来想方便大多数人的表单，其实只方便了很小部分的顾客。（哪怕这小部分用户也没有真的方便到，因为他们一样要花精力来更新自己的资料，比如收件地址和信用卡号） 最直接的结果就是这个表单妨碍了营业额——非常非常多的营业额。

The $300,000,000 Fix
The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: "You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout."
The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.
On my answering machine is the message I received from the CEO of the $25 billion retailer, the first week they saw the new sales numbers from the redesigned form. It's a simple message: "Spool! You're the man!" It didn't need to be a complex message. All we did was change a button.

价值3亿美金的修复
设计师们解决的方法非常简单：他们干掉了注册按钮，取而代之的是一个继续按钮，还有一小段话“在我们网站上您可以直接购物而不需要专门建立一个帐户，点击继续去支付。如果您希望以后更方便的购物，也可以在结账时顺便创建一个帐户”
结果：购买商品的顾客数量上升了45%。在第一个月就创造了1千5百万的额外购买额，在第一年整个网站获得了额外3亿美金的交易额。
在我的留言机上有一条信息，是一家250亿美金规模零售商的CEO发来的。当他们看见第一周的新销售额（来自一个重新设计的表单）后发了这条简短的信息：“靠，你真他妈行！”。其实不需要更复杂的表诉了，因为我们仅仅是换了一个按钮而已：）

Learn More About Web Form Designs with Luke Wroblewski
One of our most popular speakers at both the User Interface Conferences and the Web App Summit is Luke Wroblewski. If you're looking to make your application's forms deliver a more succinct and crisp user experience, then you don't want to miss out on Luke's session at the Web App Summit on April, 19, 2009 in Newport Beach CA.
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