Usability & Cross-Selling for Complex Product Lines
As a result of the merger, PBBI’s product and solution lines were complex and inherently overwhelming to new customers who often would not be able to self-select products. Because MapInfo and Group 1 Software had been successfully selling these products for years, a complete overhaul of product names, demos and product design risked confusing and alienating the existing customer base.
TBG helped PBBI identify and clearly articulate solutions packages consisting of hardware bundles, consulting, and other services. The site’s design and product copy leads from this approach, conveying the value proposition and context of various solutions vividly, and creating various pathways for users to get to them including a new information architecture separating product and solution offerings, vertical market navigation from the homepage, labels and headers that intuitively express the product offering, and site features like topical news and articles that promote individual solutions for specific industries.
Utilizing CMS taxonomy features, PBBI products and solutions were automatically related to each other and cross-sold on each product and solution page. Given the complex nature of PBBI’s products, the site’s ability to relate and communicate the “whole picture” of each solution through contextual content, significantly decreased customer confusion. In addition, links to related content like demonstration videos, multimedia spots, technical bulletins, news articles, case studies, and white papers both validated and explained the product or solutions line.
To retain and service existing customers, the site prioritized developer resources, knowledge base, and support in the main and sub navigation options, used persistent customer service calls-to-action across the site, and integrated a more powerful site search feature. Standard usability best practices like consistently using a limited number of design layouts, context indication and breadcrumb navigation, shallow site depth, and user, rather than internal, facing language help site visitors contextualize and quickly understand where they are in the PBBI site and how to access the desired information.