What is e-commerce usability?
E-commerce usability is about investigating, understanding and improving all of these things. It is a key aspect of all online retail environments as it offers companies a chance to get a genuine insight in to their customer’s likes and dislikes.
What makes e-commerce usability different is the need to focus on issues like the psychology of trust and persuasion, the impact of brand on buying choices, and the fact that improvements of a fraction of a percent can transform website profitability.
What techniques do we use?
At cxpartners we deploy a variety of user centred design techniques to get the best results for your e-commerce site. We can tailor these techniques to suit your needs and your project. Some of the techniques we frequently use with our e-commerce clients include:
- User testing, for example: qualitative methods such as depth interviews and quantitative methods like card sorting or online surveys
- Expert reviews and Competitor benchmarking – looking at what your competitors offer, and what makes you different
- Information architecture and user centred design – we can look at your customer’s journey and design an easier to use route. We have found that doing this can increase leads by 300% (you can read more about his on our Island Cruises case study page)
- Eye tracking lets you see what your users are looking at (or not looking at).
- As part of our user testing, we use specially developed heuristics or design guidelines to identify how your site can be more persuasive or win users’ trust.
We use these techniques both to evaluate existing designs and features and to develop new designs.
E-commerce usability benefits
- Customer retention: by making your site easier to use, customers are more likely to use it and keep using it
- Improved brand perception
- Lower cost per order – for instance, fewer customers need to call your help centres
Who we work with
We have worked with a wide variety of clients across private and public sectors and have worked extensively with e-commerce sites. You can see a list of these clients on our client’s page.