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For The Future Indicative, Ep 7 Part 1
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome back to the Future Indicative. I’m Alex Effgen, and in Part 2 exploring UI/UX, we begin by talking about my fashion sense.
ALICIA CLAPPER
“For example, you’re buying a tie-dye t-shirt. I’m sure you have many of them. And you’re like, I love this color. I love the pattern that I’m seeing. It seems like it’s gonna fit. It’s checking all the boxes. I’m adding to cart, and then I see a message that says, “All t-shirts are made to order. Colors may vary.”
I think to myself, I don’t know. You know, I really like what I’m seeing. But now that I know that, before I’ve actually bought it, when I get it, I know to expect that.
And so that could alleviate return rates. Just being upfront and honest about what they’re about to receive, rather than trying to say, this is exactly what you’re going to get, knowing it’s a custom product. And then them being disappointed when it’s not.
So make them feel confident, make them feel certain, be upfront, honest with all that information, even if there’s a threat to conversion rate…it will still build that lifetime value as I keep saying.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Alicia Clapper, a Director of UX/Product Design. If the surname sounds familiar, last year I interviewed her husband, Tom Clapper, for my cybersecurity episode.
“...I’m married to a UI/UX director. The user experience, the user interface. And a lot of people don’t know what that is just by hearing it, but it’s how friendly things are to you, whether or not it’s a website, an app, software, whatever.”
At the time I mentioned needing to interview Tom’s wife to explore user experience. And I’m grateful to have an expert talk me through how we SPECIALIZE the UX in order to SELL online. Now let’s SECURE the UI in order to SCALE our business.
ALICIA CLAPPER
“Going back to our free shipping example, the stakeholders say we need to push this free shipping messaging on site but there’s really no place on the product detail page to put it, we don’t have the dev resources or engineering resources to put it in the checkout. These corners have to be cut due to resources and this timeline that they’ve created. So the reactive response is, Well, we could put it above the navigation and have it be on every page. At least everyone will see it.
But it’s not the best experience. It’s not going to be a lever that eases someone at the point where they’re going to add to cart and they’re going to convert.
So if it’s a conversion lever, it’s not going to work.
And that’s a good example of having to be reactive to a stress timeline, false sense of urgency, misalignment, all that are happening internally with internal deadlines that we’ve created for whatever reason.
My push would be to give more time to that situation. Give time for the resources because free shipping is a big value proposition when it comes to online shopping.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Definitely. I started Part 1 of this episode talking about the Sears catalogue and how we then collectively pivoted to online shopping. Obviously the consumer can still interface with a human ahead of the point of sale if they walk into any kind of brick and mortar. But according to the US Census, 16.4% of total sales in the third quarter of 2025 came from e-commerce. That’s $1.8 billion in that third quarter alone. We spend a lot of money online, but we also spend a lot of time online. Don’t we deserve that experience to be a positive one? Why would a business employ a poor interface, shattering our confidence and creating a terrible experience that only makes us want to burn the internet down?
ALICIA CLAPPER
“I think it’s mostly internal misalignment on what’s important, or a sense of false urgency when launching a product, or just trying to push an idea. Having teams rush into shipping something without a shared understanding. The UX is definitely compromised in that situation and becomes more reactive.
So, it’s a poor user experience basically.
If everybody over here says consumer first, but the people that are pushing it forward and pushing the product to site don’t find that valuable, there’s going to be friction, and UX becomes more reactive and doesn’t have that time to fully create the best experience.”
ALEX EFFGEN
I often ask the question: Who can benefit from this? Quite often these conversations confirm that you can’t make one product or service for every audience. But that could mean that the user experience can also be very specific. Who our consumer is defines not only what they buy, but how they prefer to buy it.
When social media went wide, D2C brands focused a lot on their acquisition channels to cast the widest net they could by throwing money into Facebook and those platforms. But the widest net doesn’t necessarily deliver the most valuable catch if you don’t have the right boat.
ALICIA CLAPPER
“When I used to work for a gym, I’d have to go out in the community and give out these free weeks. And like a really popular spot was right by the Metro. Because there’s a lot of people coming through there. This is a numbers game. I’m giving everybody a free week here who passes me.
And maybe I got one or two people come in out of like 100 free weeks that I just gave out.
But if I went and stood by the smoothie shop. And hit people as they were coming in and out of there. Their focus is probably more on health more than one of these hundred people from the Metro.
I could narrow down my focus a little bit more as to the quality of these leads, and try to get better quality leads, to then come into the gym and see if I could sell them on a membership, because I knew that they had that mindset that you would also have for joining a gym. And it’s trying to find that common thought train to bring people in.
And so what we’re doing by casting this huge net into Facebook, you are at the Metro. You are just bringing everybody who you can in, who may not be a good quality lead. But you’re thinking it’s a numbers game. This was very common among D2C brands when they’re first starting. And the focus was not on that user experience once they got to the site. And I think that’s just a big fail point.”
ALEX EFFGEN
They brought in a lot of people, but then could not convert once the experience required the business interface to deliver the goods. To land those customers you need to qualify them ahead of time answering these questions:
ALICIA CLAPPER
“How do we harness this person? And if they’re not a good quality lead, how do we turn them into one? It just wasn’t as much of a thought previously.”
ALEX EFFGEN
When a business identifies the need of a client, different parts of the business may have distinct answers to these questions that reflect the functions they serve. If proper UX reduces friction both internally and externally, then the business can balance those cross-functional departmental answers cohesively. Alicia, what teams do you work with the most?
ALICIA CLAPPER
“Mostly marketing, operations, and customer service. Marketing understands motivation and storytelling. Operations understands reliability and fulfillment. And then customer support understands the real pain points.
And so UX becomes truly effective when we can connect all of these insights into a cohesive experience.
A lot of our initiatives actually do come out of customer support because they’re the ones talking directly to the customer. They’re finding out what’s not working. What are these pain points? And that could bubble up to an experience that they’re having onsite or something that isn’t clear when they made their purchase. If there’s a difference between what they saw online and then what they got at home.
If I purchased a t-shirt online. And I got it home and it was tight and this became a repeated experience that customer service kept seeing. And they kept seeing returns based on size. UX could take that and say, we need to say, we need somewhere to say that this is a slim fit, because people are continuously ordering the wrong size and it’s too small.
So then we would also work with marketing: How do we now market this as a slim fit? Because we need that sort of information before people are buying. And then, even operations: how are they handling those returns? This big influx of returns that are coming in, how are they handling that? How’re we refulfilling them, or putting them in inventory or whatever the case may be. But even there, like, how is that inventory then relayed back to the website to indicate how many are in stock? So it’s sort of this big ecosystem that works off of each other and with that consumer experience in the forefront of how we guide our next steps.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Alicia’s made the case that proper alignment around consumer-first thinking allows the business to produce more and sell more. SCALE-ing not only becomes easier. It becomes self-generating.
ALICIA CLAPPER
“I had created this experience on a website that guided the user through choices to make before purchasing. And the experience did well. The conversion rate increased. It was proven to be a good experience and increase conversion. That’s a win-win for everybody.
And I thought to myself, where else on the site can I mimic this experience? Where can I guide users to find what they’re looking for? And I’ve just been thinking about it more and more because it was enjoyable to the user. They found what they were looking for. Did well for us. How do I capitalize on this experience? And so I think it’s trying to find opportunities on site or within the consumer journey that can give users that same feeling of clarity and trust and confidence without feeling unnecessary.
I don’t want to do that in a place where it seems more cumbersome. So it’s also where naturally would this make sense to do again, knowing that it did well here in this spot.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Online consumers still experience the human element through the choices applied to the digital interface. But at the dawn of AI, we all wonder how long will it last. As long as customers reward their confidence with loyalty, we should not need discuss AI/AX (for now).
ALICIA CLAPPER
“There’s always the question like will AI replace UX? And I stand by no, because they’re using AI to get to the website, but then what is the experience on the site? And having a human to paint that picture and create that experience and be able to speak human to human, I think is still valued for now.
AI can enhance what we’re doing, paint a different perspective, give ideas, but not fully take over what we’re doing.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on the Future Indicative, a podcast produced by me, Alex Effgen, and Indicate Marketing. Our mission is to show what great experiences accomplish for your industry. As mentioned before, the views interfaced here are solely our own, but we love when you share, so send IndicateMarketing.com to those who’d appreciate it. Let’s explore how our humanity can help drive your business growth and market positioning. We appreciate your patronage, and continued support.
