Optimizing the Font Purchase Experience
Summary
FontShop customers were experiencing difficulty purchasing the correct font license, which resulted in calls to customer service for refunds/exchanges. Confusion over font licensing has been an ongoing problem in the font industry, but FontShop was suddenly seeing a spike in these issues so I ran a series of usability tests to understand what was causing the confusion.
Role
• Unmoderated usability testing
• Presented insights and recommendations to stakeholders
What we knew
FontShop’s purchase flow defaulted to the desktop license
FontShop’s licensing model didn’t align with the typical models used across the font industry, including Monotype’s other font sites.
Desktop and web font licenses were the most widely used and purchased licenses among customers.
As an accepted industry practice, the desktop license was typically selected by default in the purchase flow leaving customers to make a conscious choice for other license types.
What we learned
FontShop customers were purchasing font licenses, but overlooking their license options resulting in a broken user experience and post purchase calls to customer service. Our tests of 8 different font sites revealed higher participant success rates for sites that did not default to a license in the purchase flow (73% success rate) vs those that did (47% success rate), leading to the hypothesis that adding a bit of friction into the purchase flow may actually empower customers to successfully purchase their intended license.
Getting a Baseline
We wanted participants to make intentional choices for their license selection, so the following prompt was introduced so that they had to choose a license other than the license that was selected by default … “You need to purchase a font that will be used on a website. Please begin selecting a font for this purpose. Once you’ve added the font to your cart, STOP.”
— Only one person out of 5 successfully selected the correct web font license.
Incidentally, I ran the same scenario on the other three Monotype sites—MyFonts, Fonts.com, Linotype. The additional sites, with the exception of fonts.com, also defaulted to the desktop license in the purchase flow, and resulted in similar results—Less than half of the participants successfully chose the correct license.
FontShop’s purchase flow defaults to the desktop license, but participants overwhelmingly overlooked the license selection
Analyzing the Competition
I tested additional competitor sites, each with varied experiences, but all sharing the common thread of not defaulting to a license in the purchase flow. Our A-HA moment hit us when we realized that participants were more successful in selecting the appropriate license when they were forced to select the license rather than having one pre-selected for them. Some sites initiated a stepped approach only allowing customers to advance closer to check out once they satisfied all license requirements.
Building friction into an experience is usually frowned upon, but in a font purchasing scenario, it can actually protect the customer from making the wrong purchase.
Many competitors do not default to a license, instead forcing customers to be deliberate in their choice. Some sites (right) force customers through a stepped purchase flow only allowing them to purchase once they’ve made all the appropriate selections.
Recommendations
We were limited on how much we could change the design of the FontShop site, but the primary recommendation was that Monotype begin to introduce necessary friction in the purchase flows for FontShop as well as all of their other sites by moving away from a pre-selected license.