Guide some by the hand, get out of others’ way – one store, two completely different needs

“I find it hard to search here. Maybe I just don’t know this stuff, but where do I find a blood pressure monitor?” said Kamil, trying to buy an ordinary home blood pressure monitor.

A few months later, Dawid, a physiotherapist running his own practice, talked about the same store in a completely different way: “The best part is I have an account there and I just reorder the product, and it’s off my plate.”

The same store. The same interface. Two completely different needs.

In this post I’ll show you why that happens, and why understanding that difference cost us two separate rounds of research, run with two completely different methods.

Why did we research this twice?

Medeocare, an e-commerce store in the medical and cosmetics industry, serves two very different customer groups at the same time.

On one side there are individual customers (B2C, business to customer), who buy single products, bandages for a family member or home equipment, say. On the other side, business customers (B2B, business to business), owners of practices, salons and medical facilities, who regularly stock up their business or buy products in bulk.

At the start we ran classic usability testing of the whole purchase path, with specific tasks to complete. We recruited both groups for it at the same time.

We had no trouble gathering individual customers. Business customers were harder to find; only two people made it into the test. What’s more, both of them turned out to be domain experts in medicine, not the real procurement people who buy for a clinic or salon day to day. They knew the products inside out, but not necessarily the everyday process of placing an order for a business.

That was the moment we saw one method wouldn’t answer every question we had.

Classic usability testing checks whether someone can find a product and get through checkout successfully. That’s a good scenario for an individual customer, who’s on the site now and then and learns it from scratch each time.

But it doesn’t answer the questions that matter for a business customer:

• does the store understand their industry’s specifics?
• does it offer terms suited to bulk orders?
• is it more convenient to place an order themselves, or contact a sales rep?
• does the store let them quickly reorder products they’ve been buying for months?

So instead of another round of task-based testing, we ran six in-depth interviews with real business customers, recruited directly by Medeocare from among its actual customers.

No stopwatch, no step-by-step script. Instead we started with a simpler question:

What does your workday look like, and where do you get your supplies?

And that’s when answers started coming up that we never could have gotten from classic usability testing.

That’s an important lesson in itself, one we’ll come back to at the end: sometimes the difference between customer segments doesn’t show up in the research results. It shows up earlier, at the moment you choose your method.

The individual customer wants you to hold their hand

An individual customer usually visits a medical store’s site once in a while, with a specific, often somewhat stressful need. They’re looking for something for themselves or a loved one. They don’t know the industry’s vocabulary, and they’re not going to learn it. They just want to find the right product and check out.

Here’s how one of the test participants, Kamil, described trying to find an ordinary blood pressure monitor in a menu split by medical specialty:

“Well, honestly, I’ve got diagnostics here, I’ve got diagnostic tests, gynecology. That’s not what I’m thinking of at all. ENT, kits (…) That’s not it at all.”

Another participant, Ida, hit exactly the same wall from a different part of the menu:

“Maybe I’ll go through the categories (…) I guess diagnostics. Measuring device. [couldn’t find it]. Apparently it isn’t a ‘measuring device’.”

When navigation fails, the natural reflex is to flee to the search bar. Except the search bar had its own problems. It didn’t tolerate typos or word variants, and the results interface would sometimes reload mid-typing, making the search even harder.

An individual customer doesn’t need elaborate filters or advanced options here. They need a guide. Someone to hold their hand. Plain language. A clear path for someone who doesn’t know medicine. A search bar that forgives a typo.

The test participants themselves actually suggested one possible solution. Michał proposed splitting the site into two simple paths:

“When you’re searching those categories, you’d just have the regular consumer, individual person or whatever, and then the professional. And then the categories are different. That would make it way easier to find.”

For an individual customer, good navigation is navigation that gets them to their goal, even if they don’t yet know what that goal is called.

The business customer wants you to get out of their way

The business customer is a completely different story.

They know exactly what they’re looking for, because they’ve been buying the same thing for months or years. They don’t need anyone explaining what a given product is. What they need is for placing an order to take as little time as possible, because that time could be spent with a patient or a client instead.

Dawid, a physiotherapist running two practices, put it bluntly:

“I’d rather keep that time for myself.”

That’s why a “Reorder” feature matters far more to this kind of customer than any promotion or price comparison.

But a business customer also has needs that don’t exist at all in an individual customer’s world. A podiatrist who happened to be opening her own practice explained to me why a free-shipping threshold set for retail customers felt off to her:

“I think that 45 dollars is actually too low. In my opinion, free shipping from 125 dollars would be completely fair, that’s pretty standard for my industry.”

Meanwhile, the person in charge of ordering at a medical facility told us about a need an individual customer would probably never expect from an online store at all, negotiating prices with a sales rep and having them permanently attached to the company’s account:

“I know, say the alcohol wipes are $2, I think a fair price is $1.60, so I just sent that information to the company, and if they decide they can grant that discount, they approve it and that price is already attached to the customer’s account.”

Medeocare doesn’t offer a feature like that. So for some business customers, the real commercial relationship happens by email with a rep, and the website is just a supplement to it.

Two groups. Two completely different sets of expectations of the same store.

Same disease, two different symptoms

The most interesting part, though, came when we laid the results of both studies side by side.

It turned out that at the root of both groups’ problems lies the exact same cause: a site architecture built around specialist medical categories.

For the individual customer, this shows up as confusion and jargonthey don’t understand.

For the business customer, the same mechanism works in a paradoxically opposite way. If their narrow specialty, podiatry, for instance, isn’t fully reflected in the store’s categories,, they also feel lost, just for a different reason.

The podiatrist mentioned earlier summed it up bluntly:

“If I had to decide whether to order from you based purely on going into the podiatry specialty, I’d walk away from this site 100% of the time.”

The category technically existed. But it held only a fraction of the products she was actually looking for. The rest of the products she needed were on the site, but weren’t attached to her specialty.

The result? She ordered from Medeocare only what she could easily find, and bought the rest of her practice’s supplies from a competitor, even though she never formally stopped working with them.

One information architecture, two completely different ways it can fail you.

Don’t start from the method, start from the question

If I had to pull one piece of advice out of this project for someone just starting to plan research for their own store, I’d say:

Don’t assume one research scenario will answer questions about all of your customers at once.

The individual customer and the business customer don’t just differ in how much they buy. They differ in what they even expect from the purchase process at all. One needs a guide through unfamiliar territory; the other needs you to get out of their way and let them act as fast as possible.

So when standard usability testing stopped giving us meaningful answers for the B2B segment, we didn’t try to stretch two unusual people’s results over the whole segment.

We changed the method, because the questions we wanted answered had changed.

Questions about bulk terms, the relationship with a sales rep, and how well the store fit a specific specialty didn’t fit inside the “find a product and buy it” formula.

Back to the customers from the start of this post: both were looking at the exact same store. One saw a maze of incomprehensible categories. The other saw an account where everything is off his plate. That difference isn’t a matter of taste. It’s a signal that one store can be convenient for one group and completely illegible to another at the same time.

That’s why good research doesn’t start with the question which method should we choose? It starts with the question, what do we actually want to learn, and from whom?

A well-designed store can be a great experience for some customers and completely illegible to others, all at once, if you only ever research one of those groups.

What’s next?

Now we’re turning the research findings into concrete design decisions, working on how to translate both customer groups’ needs into an experience that’s simpler for B2C and, at the same time, faster and more functional for B2B.

That’s exactly where the project’s next stage: begins, we’re turning the research observations into concrete changes on the site, ones meant to translate into a better customer experience and better business results.