NJ: Any tips on what to avoid with ecommerce sites? TW: Eliminate usability problems in forms and checkout processes. The golden rule really around usability is “don’t throw away the user’s work”. This means if someone is committing time and energy into typing details into a form, then any form that, where there is an error, chucks away that data and forces you to rekey it will cause frustration. Another example, if the user wants to go away to another page to check the price of something before they buy, and they then come back and data in the form has been lost – that’s throwing their work away. Doing this is a really quick way of losing a sale and so have a good hard look at the processes on your site where that could happen.
NJ: You mentioned listening to your customer, how would you go about eliciting a response from them? TW: When I am trying to work out what’s happening on a site, and what consumers need, the first thing I would tend to say is start with a site survey. And site surveys – it’s very easy for them to get out of control, and start asking the wrong sort of questions. They should be very focused on: who is coming to this site? Why are they coming to the site? (The visitor’s objectives). And yes, you can also ask them very basic questions about the level of satisfaction with their visit but really a site survey is only about who is coming and why.
NJ: Are there other ways to find out more about the user’s experience on your website? TW: The user depth interviews are one to one research interviews with representative users, where you ask them to use the site, set them tasks to perform and observe them using and interacting. It is a lot richer, of course, as a way of gathering information about usage than the site survey or by looking at your weblogs – it is a really good way of understanding what my industry jargon calls “context of use”: how do people use sites like this in the context of making a purchase decision.
12 HIT ME! HOW TO GET YOUR BUSINESS TO PUNCH ITS WEIGHT 0NLINE
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53