06 Apr
Imagine you are driving somewhere in rush hour and your SatNav offers you two routes.
The first is more direct, fewer miles and take 30 minutes, but most of that time will be spent trundling along in heavy traffic, stopping and starting through traffic lights and junctions.
The second, which covers more miles, will take you an extra 10 minutes. However, there is no traffic at all, a higher speed limit and some nice views of the countryside. Which route do you choose?
Most people will choose the latter because it provides a better experience. There is an important message here relating to UX for any business implementing a virtual waiting room to protect their website’s performance and availability during peak web traffic events.
What does a virtual waiting room have to do with UX?
Before we answer this question, perhaps we should define UX (user experience). It might seem obvious, but UX is what the user experiences when interacting with a system, whether that’s a website, an app, an in-store experience or anything else.
The way the user interacts with each element influences how they feel, which in turn shapes their sentiment towards the brand associated with it. Ultimately these things affect their loyalty to the brand and other factors such as lifetime spend, so UX is very important.
UX could mean how a button feels when you press it. It could mean how much information is displayed at any one time on a screen, or how often the customer is checked on by a member of staff. UX is both an art and a science.
At TrafficDefender, we see virtual waiting rooms in the same way. The online queue should never be overlooked as part of the overall UX of a website.
Because it’s much harder to influence customer satisfaction later in the user journey, UX experts spend most of their time looking at the usual first touchpoints for customers (the homepage and landing pages). We believe online queue pages must be deemed just as important.
How to deliver excellent UX from a virtual waiting room
Whilst nobody would admit to enjoying having to wait for anything, the actual time spent waiting has little real influence over the perception of the wait. Good UX is the way to make a wait in a virtual queue feel as short as possible. We also believe that a good virtual waiting room should:
- Support omni-channel by maintaining consistent branding, messaging and voice
- Feel fair and secure, acknowledge the visitor, and set realistic expectations for their wait
- Provide intrinsically valuable distractions related to the brand to shorten the perceived wait
At TrafficDefender our virtual waiting room is white labelled to allow brands the flexibility to incorporate the online queue into their UX. Just a few of the features we have seen work well for our customers include:
- An on-brand, dynamic visualisation of queue position and estimated wait time
- Enticing copy, product images or videos to build anticipation and reinforce brand
- Interactive elements like questions, quizzes and games to make time pass more quickly
- A regularly updated message feed to reassure those waiting in the queue
TrafficDefender is the virtual waiting room built for great UX
TrafficDefender protects sites against crashes and performance issues at peak times, whether these are expected or unexpected, whilst maintaining excellent UX and retaining customers.
If you’d like us to show you how, simply sign up for a demonstration and we’d be happy to explain further one-to-one.
