Lack Of Clarity Looses Sales
Something as simple as naming something can assume more than a potential customer wants to know. Finding this out was a surprise and a shock.
Andy Brice’s recent blog included a questionnaire for actual ratios of software publishers’ web site visitors to downloads to purchases. There are many and varied numbers bandied about in the various trade publications, and Andy wanted to get a reality check based on actual experience.
Like everyone else who sells software on the Internet, we keep records of these, going back to 1999, but they weren’t immediately on hand when Andy’s questionnaire was opened. In a while these were located and the questionnaire filled out with our numbers.
One thing we’ve noticed is that the ratio of downloads to first used has never been 100%. We’ve never been able to ascribe this gap to anything, although there are a lot of theories, an uptown word for uninformed guesses. We moved on to other things after concluding that this curiosity to one of Life’s Mysteries.
Several days after Andy’s blog I was talking to a networking partner, who mentioned that a relative of theirs couldn’t install one of our software products. Curious, to say the least, I called them to find out what the problem was. But first, a little history.
When we started offering software products on the Internet, the file naming conventions for mirror sites were the old DOS eight dot three, so the file names were cryptic and, in retrospect, meaningless. We changed this when Windows 2K became widely available, with longer and more descriptive filenames. The distributions were, and still are, ZIPed files, and the filenames took the form InstallFutureWareProductName.zip. The installer included a setup.exe among other files. When the installer was revamped to a unit file, its filename took the form InstallFutureWareProductName.exe.
Moving back to the present, the problem was because the Folder Option’s hid the file extensions, so there would be two files with the same name, one the ZIPed and one the executable, distinctions that are not apparent. You’d expect that after extraction the actual installation only occurs 50% of the time, and it’s a monument to prospects’ tenacity that the ration is higher. Still, a significant number of prospects understandably bailed a demonstration if ever one is needed that confusion in a prospect’s mind is the same thing as a hard No.
Easy fix, but it took a few days to implement and test.
- Distributable files are named UnzipToInstallFutureWareProductName.zip
- Installers extracted from the distrubutions are named InstallFutureWareProductName.exe
- Product executables deployed by the installers are still named FutureWareProductName.exe
We’ll be watching the downloads to first runs ratio more closely, and will report any significant change.
And, we’re definitely going to have to work harder about seeing things from a prospect’s perspective, not our own unstated assumptions.
© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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Tags: file naming, inducing confusion, information clarity, software sales