Managing risk for a High Street giant

With 350 restaurants across the UK, Nando’s is one of the giants of the British High Street.
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Over the last few years we’ve been helping them bring the phenomenal success of their offline experience into their ever-expanding online channels.

With significant investments in both internal and external teams, they knew the importance of CRO in being able to scientifically improve the experience for their customers. However, they also knew that branching into this area would require the support of a dedicated, expert team to guide them.

Through close collaboration with the Ecommerce team from the outset, upskilling and developing them has been an integral part of our relationship.

Within their first three months with us, they’d already generated enough additional online revenue to pay for our services for the year 7 times over!

The navigation was both inconsistent & physically difficult to operate.

It would change depending on where the visitor was in the journey, and the touch area of the menu link itself was very small. On top of that, it was located in the diagonally opposite corner to most (right-handed) visitors' thumbs. And that made it even more frustrating to use.

...but revenue decreased by 1.42%

We observed an increase in clicks on navigation which resulted in less overall browsing of different subsections. Visitors browsed less which caused a decrease in the amount people were buying. This suggests a certain degree of impulse buying happening previously.

We assumed that the test would win, and our hypothesis was based on user data that supported this!

Internally, it was the preferred approach and would have been rolled out without testing without our input.

Visitors said one thing but did another!

The new navigation would have caused a decrease in revenue & without keeping a Control group, we would never have known.

Both the Control & our original experiment had one thing in common - they utilised non-standard UI elements.

And whilst "standard" elements might be considered boring, they are instantly recognisable. And instant recognition means instant usability.

...this time both conversion & revenue increased with it.

Based on user research the business would have rolled out the new horizontal scroll style navigation without testing.

What visitors say they want isn’t always how they respond when it comes to voting with real money.

That’s why testing is so important - it validates business assumptions and reduces risk.

Even though the original test failed to produce a commercially-beneficial experience, it was still a win because it saved the business from implementing something that would have cost them money.

And by learning from that initial test, we found a way that worked for everyone.