well, maybe not everyone but certainly you can sympathize with the sentiment. We all dream of getting that rare GTO (ok, that’s just me) but the point is, we all dream about owning a great car but not buying them. Why is that? Well, the dealership is a high-pressure sales environment. Every move, statement and eye wiggle is scripted to get us to buy a car.

 "I’ll have to check with my manager"

"What will it take to get you to take this baby home with you today?"

<endless waiting designed to make you willing to do anything to leave>

<forms, upon forms, upon forms>

Any of this sounding familiar yet? Why am I bringing this up and making you sweat, cringe and shiver all at the same time?

-glad you asked-

Over on the Lunametrics Blog, Robbin Steif has published part four of her interview with Avinash Kaushik about his book "Web Analytics: An Hour A Day" and at one point she asks

Why do you care so much about the customer experience and discount conversion rate so much? (We can say, p. 340, but you address this elsewhere too) The way that I look at it, there are either other conversions (like applying for a job, or getting help on the website), and the analyst is just forgetting to include those conversions. Or, it’s important that the customer have a good experience so that when he is ready to buy, he will (and it is a long term problem, but it is still about conversion rate.) Or, he will tell other people or write about what a good experience he had, and *they* will come and convert, eventually. So it is still a conversion rate problem. Ultimately, it is always about conversion rate. (Go ahead. Tell me that I’m wrong.)

Avinash goes into a long and informative response detailing why focusing on just conversion rate is a bad idea. For me, it boils down to ‘visitors at your site have all kinds of tasks in mind - other than buying - so optimizing for just one task neglects (or worse) the other visitors.’

However, it got me thinking … well that’s unfair … I had a little flash of an idea and here it is:

"I’ll bet Car Dealerships are massively over optimized for ‘Conversion’"

So, even if you are there to buy, it can be (and often is) a massively uncomfortable experience. If, instead of optimizing for conversion, you optimize the user/consumer experience in effect what you are doing is creating a comfortable and reassuring environment where your visitors can feel confident in doing whatever it is they came there to do.

You don’t want to be the car dealership of the online world do you?

Does anyone have a story about how optimizing for the user (versus a metric like conversion rate) had unanticipated positive results? Please share your story in the comments here.

Hey, I’m equal opportunity - if you have a UX horror story share it here too…