The hostile reaction to M&S’s disclosure of an 8% decline in online sales, following the launch of its new website, is a timely reminder of the risks involved in major replatforming programmes.

The hostile reaction to M&S’s disclosure of an 8% decline in online sales, following the launch of its new website, is a timely reminder of the risks involved in major replatforming programmes.

It is easy to point to some significant and annoying glitches in the site’s new interface and having to ask all 6 million registered customers to set up new passwords before they could use the new service is the online equivalent of locking all your customers out of your new store on opening day.

However I suspect that the seeds of M&S’s predicament were sown at a very early stage of project planning.

That is because too many companies view replatforming as a technical challenge, rather than seeing it for what it really is: a customer challenge.

The result is that the lion’s share of replatforming budgets and resources tend to be absorbed by the technical challenges, such as new infrastructure, cloud services, data migration, back end integration. 

Too often, this crowds out the voices in the project team that represent the customer.

In the context of a technical challenge, asking customers to set up new passwords must have seemed like a viable and expedient option.

In a customer experience-led project, it would simply be unthinkable.

At the very least, a solution to minimise the disruption and make it as easy as possible would have to be found.

M&S has said that the site was designed with “the customer right at the heart” and that it was thoroughly tested with customers prior to launch.

But you have to ask whether customers really told M&S that they wanted more promotional content at the expense of being able to search for and filter products effectively?

And whether the customer research M&S did do was structured in a way that could truly inform and influence the information architecture and signposting used on the site.

Unfortunately M&S is learning, in a very public and expensive way, that designing customer experiences based on consumer insight is a specialism and that the many tried-and-tested tools of the user experience industry are not enough, in isolation, to ensure a redesign will work commercially.

Retailers must understand that customers have a highly-developed sense of what separates a good experience from a bad one.

But they feel it intuitively, rather than understanding it rationally.

It takes more than just task-based testing sessions to identify the complex emotional factors which influence buying behavior just as much as rational factors such as price and product features.

The problems at M&S could, and should, have been avoided. There is simply no need to expect a new site to take six months to ‘bed in’ which is what the directors of M&S are telling shareholders.

Yes, there will always be a period of discovery for users, and even a certain amount of relearning of the new site’s functionality.

But if a site has been designed to fit the expectations and preferences of its target audience, any disruption should be short-lived and the commercial benefits soon realised.

If your company is planning a replatforming project right now, and M&S’s experience is keeping you awake at night, make it your number one priority to ask whether or not the voice of the customer is genuinely guiding the project team’s actions.

  • Peter Ballard is co-founder of experience design company Foolproof