What “The Hut” can teach us about Intelligent Product Feature Prioritization
If I were to construct a pie chart to illustrate, proportionately, the types of food that comprise my entire diet… it would be a pizza pie chart.
Data visualization shown represents entirety of adult life, and is an average depiction of aggregate consumption of food types consumed since 2006. A “slice” of data for any time period within said measurement window has 95% certainty of not falling outside of a 2 standard deviation variance.
I eat more pizza than I care to admit, but — because I value transparency and honesty in any relationship, including an author/reader relationship — I will admit it: I probably eat pizza 4 times a week. But, TO BE FAIR, that includes leftovers. So basically I’m doing pizza twice a week, but eating it for two days each time I get it.
Due to this (super healthy) “hashtag no days off” dietary discipline, I consequently interact with a variety of digital product experiences… many of those designed and built by some of the industry's most elite product development minds. For national brands like Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s, a few percentage points difference in average transaction value, upsell conversion rate, or cart abandonment rate could equate to millions of dollars earned or lost.
As a product guy, I’m constantly critiquing every conversion funnel I get thrown into, and there are great lessons to be learned from the industry that brought us the Domino’s Pizza Tracker. But recently, it was Pizza Hut’s mobile website ordering experience that caught my attention by showing a great example of responsible and intelligent feature prioritization.
There are always more product enhancements and feature requests than there is time or resources to complete them. The key to successful product development that consistently delights users by delivering incremental value with each release… is intelligent prioritization.
So let’s look at this example from Pizza Hut…
I was ordering a few items from their "$5 ’N Up Lineup,” and — with an extra man-child mouth to feed as my son’s friend was visiting the house — I was haphazardly salt-bae-sprinkling all sorts of wild toppings on these hand-tossed pies. When it came to check-out time, it was plain to see: my order total was NOT equal to "[number of items I ordered] * $5.99" (like a pizza deal newb might expect). Even though I knew I was going to pay more for my brazen topping-adding behavior, I still wondered, “Is this the right price?”
To my delight, just as I was questioning the validity of the total, I noticed a link that read 'Why this price?’
To my dismay, upon tapping said link, I was given information I already knew (they told me I added extra toppings). But, that message still served to quench 80% of my thirst for pricing answers, simply by confirming my assumptions.
Why is this a good example of Intelligent Feature Prioritization?
“You just said their product disappointed you by not giving you a detailed explanation of your order total. How is this intelligent?” - you, just now, in your head.
I completely agree, the most ideal user experience would have shown me a precise breakdown of the “tasty extras” I ordered… and would have looked something like this:
“You added [name of item(s) selected above and beyond the core items allowed to be selected] to your [name of item that the add-on(s) was/were added to]. This raised the price by [amount charged for additional items]."
Example: You added [jalapeño] to your [medium one-topping pizza]. This raised the price by [$1.50].
The Pizza Hut product team — by adding the ‘Why this price?’ link — was (almost certainly) responding to a feature request discovered during user testing or recorded session analysis, where customer(s) asked: “Why is this price higher than what I thought it was going to be?”
Of course, these pizza product pros knew/know that a fully transparent and personalized answer to that question (like the example I gave above) would be better answer than a one-size-fits-all, “You added extra toppings, remember?” But, here’s the thing: developing and displaying that fancy itemized receipt of “tasty extras” comes at two costs:
Development capacity. There are, no doubt, thousands of ideas sitting in the Pizza Hut product backlog. Choosing one work item or enhancement means not choosing another. The generic message is a scope-of-work-reducing shortcut to eliminate (at least most of) that “price curiosity” user experience friction, while also leaving capacity available for enhancements that could deliver even more value.
Potential to create conversion objections / cart abandonment. Some users may see that granular price itemization and say, “Ummm… A DOLLAR FIFTY FOR JALAPEÑOS!? No sir-ee-bob!” That user may, then, (as a detriment to The Hut) modify their order to reduce the transaction value, or abandon completely in frustration if they don’t see an easy path to make a desired order modification.
By veiling the unit cost of each “tasty extra” in the order summary, Pizza Hut is effectively taking advantage of second-degree price discrimination in the form of bundling.
If a feature enhancement (like improving the ‘Why this price?’ prompt) consumes precious engineering bandwidth AND could potentially have an adverse impact on revenue-impacting KPIs… then it would be intelligent product feature prioritization to focus on the “shortcut" to reduce UX friction (by displaying a generic answer), while also leaving capacity available for other tasty product extras.
Haters will say…
“Dude, it’s not at all difficult to program the full price breakdown of the order including whatever extras were selected. I know code, OK. I could totally do that with like some simple if/then statements.”
We get it, bro. You used to “hack” your MySpace to get it to play Creed’s “Arms Wide Open” automatically whenever someone visited your lame ass profile. You’re missing the point, which is: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Responsible product development and feature prioritization means not getting sucked into (often fun and engaging) challenges of how to do something, but instead, focuses more on why a development group should do it in the first place.
That said, I do need to take a little sip of the hater-ade myself and say, “Yo Pizza Hut, you’re showing me a QWERTY keyboard when asking for my 10-digit phone number. Mobile input types. Look ‘em up.” PS - You’re welcome for not charging for that “tasty product extra".
