Ecommerce optimisation tips: Why you shouldn’t treat your users like flies
This is the first of a series of six posts where I’ll uncover some key UX principles that are fundamental to designing great ecommerce user experiences.
Every week we will post a new article. The topics we will cover are:
- Designing for desirability and how to avoid feature creep
- Combining analytics with user testing
- How to make users trust you
- Identifying what makes people buy
- The importance of simplicity
This week we focus on using the capabilities of the web to differentiate it from high street shopping experiences.
Unpicking the classic ecommerce experience
Imagine the web came first and shopkeepers learnt from websites about the art of selling on the high street.
Upon entering the shop you’d be greeted by someone who claims to know you, to know what you want to buy, based on what other people like you had bought.
After managing to shake off this frankly worrying little man, a huge hoarding flies through the sky and suggests you might want to take part in a survey. Remember it’ll only take 5 minutes and you might be entered into a free prize draw, er no thanks.
You finally get to some products but they are so small you can barely see them. You decide to compare what you are looking at with some similar products but all you’re shown are more expensive alternatives.
After choosing a product to buy, your efforts to pay are thwarted by someone who wants you to register with him first. He forces you to create an account, but only if you promise to come up with a username and password so cryptic that no man could ever recall.
Upon registering you finally get to pay and are still wondering how much this is going to cost. When you finally get your credit card out you are alarmed to discover that the product has doubled in price once you’ve insured it, wrapped it, delivered it and paid the admin charges!
Ok, so it’s a ridiculous scenario but thought provoking when you consider the typical ecommerce user experience.
‘If you cant measure it, you can’t manage it’
The success of websites is often determined by setting targets for usage metrics that provide a method of both measurement and comparison. Paradoxically, these metrics often represent the polar opposite of what website users would consider to represent a successful experience.
The metric of ‘Time on site’ or ‘stickyness’ is often seen as something that site owners aspire to maximize, but the point of the web is about allowing self service and getting on with our tasks as quickly and easily as possible.
Users don’t like sites that behave like Venus Fly Traps
Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28568408@N03/2667935622/
Websites should not be thought of like fly traps. People don’t like being stuck in things. If users are spending a long time on your site then this could be due to all manner of reasons both positive and negative.
Another misunderstood metric of success is page views. The idea that it can be a good think to make someone look at as many of your pages as possible just doesn’t make sense. This behaviour can often indicate that someone is lost and not finding what they want, when should this ever be seen as a measure of success?
So what can we do to make online shopping easier and more enjoyable?
Make the most of the capabilities of the web
The web offers the ability to create a shopping experience that suits the shopper. Users should be able to find the products that they want to buy in ways that suit them.
Online stores have the capability to list items in multiple locations that people will find by using multiple routes to products. The online marketplace Etsy provides an excellent example of this. I can browse by:
- Categories (art, candles, music, etc…)
- Location (nice way of allowing people to shop “locally”)
- Colour (clearly an important consideration for clothing)
- Editors picks (endorsement via the site editors)
- ‘Pounce’ (shows you objects that have just sold – conveying the zeitgeist)
Etsy offers a huge range of methods to discover products
The list goes on offering 15 different ways in total to browse the product inventory on the site. What is so effective about this approach is that it covers off so many reasons why a potential shopper may be visiting and so answers what I call the primary requirement of the user.
If you are after a new car and you’ve got a few kids and a dog you might be in the market for an estate. In this instance, the primary requirement is the size of the car. The buyer is not going to be interested in anything that doesn’t meet their primary requirement so let the user make that selection and remove any irrelevant products.
Websites that allow users to convey their primary requirement quickly and easily are hugely successful. To continue the automotive theme, on Autotrader I can quickly define my primary requirement/s and rapidly create a short list of cars that suit what I’m looking for.
Autotrader search options showing refined search
If users can quickly convey their primary requirements online as they are used to doing when they walk into a shop, ‘Hello Mr salesman, I’m after a 2 man tent that is lightweight, durable and waterproof but I’ve only got £100 to spend’ then they can quickly get to the products that suit them.
When people can have this level of customization and control over what is being presented to them, the web starts to act like the ultimate salesman who knows all of their products so well they can recommend the perfect one to suit you. This is where the web can really triumph over the high street.
Users like to research
With the proliferation of the social web we are using the opinions of our peers more and more to help to inform our buying decisions. The web should make it easy to connect us with other people who are trying to make similar buying decisions and allow us to share our collective knowledge so that we can make the most informed purchase.
We often hear users tell us during research projects how they use the web for research. This is such an important task for activities such as holiday planning that websites must support despite them possibly not immediately resulting in a transaction. Clearly ecommerce must focus on making buying easy, but if users cant research when they want to, they won’t buy either.
Given the mass of data collected about online behaviour, websites should be able to offer a service that a physical shop never could. It would be interesting to see how companies apply what they learn online to the offline environment. How are you using online behaviour to inform offline decisions? I’d love to be pointed to any case studies anyone can share.
Read my next post on
designing for desirability and how to avoid feature creep.
About the author
James is a Principal User Experience consultant at cxpartners. He’s got over 10 years of experience working with brands like MTV, Orange and Expedia. He loves photography and is very proud of his garden shed. Email James, or call +44 (0)117 946 3930
Subscribe to the RSS feed