Dec 15, 12:52 AM |
I stumbled upon this research – The Truth About Download Time from User Interface Engineering website. And it makes you think that you should be more critical to what users say about your site and try to find the real problem they are referring to.
Apr 20, 12:49 AM |
I found post of Luke Wroblewski on UXmatters website where he turned this table 
Into this
I think I found even better solution to simplify this part of user interface.
I should mention though that improvements are based on some assumptions. First of them is that the table we design is a part of some interface of some kind of application. It could be web or desktop based software. And second assumption is that users work with application on some repetitive basis. That could mean they work with it at least more than once in their life and it could be as often as several times daily.
With those assumptions I think we can turn the table into this:
This way I think user will need even less time to see all the information presented in the table. Especially it will be easy for experienced frequent users. They will automatically know that first number is current day, second is current month and third one is for previous month. For new users or users in doubt once they rollover the number for which they don’t know the meaning, they will see a description.
By using interactivity we can build even more condensed informational structures.
To be right it’s not an improvement of Luke’s design it’s just a proposal for simplifying it for frequent users.
Technorati tags: Interface / Design / / Usability
Mar 23, 01:29 PM |
Experience design is an approach in developing products that puts user at the center of a process. User experience is built during the moments of interaction with the system, brand or environment.
Most successful companies practice user experience oriented process of developing their brands today. And this approach proves to be very efficient in building loyal customer base in offline world. Would it make sense to do the same in building online brands?
I’d say it would make even more sense. Online competition is even more sever and access to competitive brands is much easier. Putting user in the head of the game gives a serious advantage in such a competitive world.
How user experience is different than usability?
Usability is just one part of a full experience. And ecommerce user experience is much wider category and much harder to approach and consider in development process.
User experience design consists of many different disciplines and requires experience in multiple aspects of brand development.
Peter Morville on his website offers his view of user experience honeycomp.
He names these facets of user experience:
Although it depicts pretty general approach for user experience design I’m going to touch more on ecommerce user experience in my next article.
Some resources:
User experience by Apple
Ecommerce user experience report from NNGroup
Aug 13, 12:30 AM |
Of course you need it, but what kind? Since I touched the topic of shopping cart design in my previous post, I decided to continue with ideas about improving the heart of e-commerce store.
Shopping cart abandonment is a big problem.
Reports from industry publications say that on average up to 98% of site visitors don’t actually make purchases. Conversion rate of 2% is considered to be pretty good for many product groups. Those numbers clearly show that there is a lot of room for improvement. One slight change in the way your store works can have really big impact. It may actually separate your business from being successful or broke. Although design is just on factor in success along with pricing, site policies, product variety and customer service, it’s pretty important one.
With this in mind I feel like every merchant should do the best he can to make sure that shopping in his store is as easy and straightforward as possible.
It’s bad enough that small percent of visitors even gets to the shopping cart, but loosing them in process of checkout is even worse. Some reports show that up to 75% of online shoppers abandon their carts. There are many reasons why this number is so high and one of them is nature of online shopping, but there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Does navigation on shopping cart page going to affect your sales?
I feel that it certainly does. As soon as you got your customer in shopping cart, you want to make process of checking out as smooth and straightforward as possible – you want them to move in one direction – finalizing the purchase. There is no need to have complex navigation that leads to all section pages or may be even all items in your store from shopping cart. It can add to the clutter of the page and make is visually more complex and confusing. They make get distracted but some of your sections in the store trying to find some of the items and get taken away from that purchasing mood they were in. Spontaneous shopping is pretty popular and although not everybody agrees that they do it, a lot of us make purchases that they wouldn’t do next day or day before that.
What about effective up sell strategies and multi-item purchases?
I agree that shopping cart use online is very different than in a brick and mortar store. Some people may just put items into cart, so they can hold to them while they look around. Some people do that just to check shipping charges. And they need their way back to continue shopping and add even more items into cart. I agree with that, and having full navigation with sections of your store would make it easier for them to do so.
But I described very good solution for upselling in my previous post – linking to item and section page where customer came from. That’s good enough in most cases. If customer wants to continue shopping he usually doesn’t want to start from the very beginning anyway (which he still can clicking on your logo to go to the homepage). He either wants to see similar products or accessories to product he just placed into cart. That’s all he needs. And usually there is no need to give him more than accessories on shopping cart for his item and links to item itself and section for it.
Minimizing ways out of shopping cart besides checking out is going to help your business to convert site visitors into customers. It’s better to get more customers for business with fewer items, than few customers with many items anyway.
Additional steps to ensure better conversion rates.
For header of the page you should always have your logo and your brand design features to bring more trust in transaction and build association of nice shopping experience with your name. If you have multi-page checkout flow, please, provide navigation for all the steps to make fixing errors easier by your customers. Have information for client, who may feel insecure purchasing online and would prefer order by phone or by mail.
How big guys design their carts?
If you check how checking out process is organized in giant stores as amazon.com, wallmart.com or apple.com you will see that they actually use all these principles in their shopping cart design.
But once again – invest your time and resources in research. Majority of merchants don’t have any numbers of shopping cart abandonment in their stores or information about ways their clients shop and use shopping cart.
Use your web stats to see patterns in your store usage and make your own conclusions about steps you should take to improve shopping cart usability for your kind of business and your clients.
Additional resources:
Shopping Cart Abandonment: Why You Need More of It Where to direct a client after he clicked on add to cart button 20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart AbandonmentTags
Internet, Computers and Internet, Design, Technology, Usability, Accessibility, Ecommerce
Aug 6, 03:09 AM |
Today I want to talk about one question a lot of online merchants ask themselves – what to do with a client after he added an item to his shopping cart.
There are many different kinds of shopping carts. And it would be safe to say that the idea is taken from a real shopping cart in a brick and mortar store. You walk around the store pick the items you may like and when ready to check out you go to available cashier. Online things are similar and different at the same time.
There are three main ways shopping carts work now:
1) After clicking “add to cart” button you stay on the same page and continue shopping until you click the link usually at the top of a page that leads you to shopping cart.
2) Another one is when you’re directed to the shopping cart each time you add an item. You can select checkout button or continue shopping after that.
3) And the last one that is getting popular now is when you stay on the page but there is minicart that shows you how many items you have in your shopping cart. You can always click on minicart to go and see full information about what’s inside the cart.
Each one of these have its advantages and disadvantages. One thing that is really important in making good shopping experience for customers is to make process clear, so your clients know what’s going on, where they are now and what they should do next.Not directing customer to shopping cart each time after adding item makes it confusing for them. Client is not sure if he added item or not. He is not sure what he already has in cart. And chances of him leave the site are greater this way. He is not offered to pay for the items and process of checking out is getting further from him. Abandoned shopping carts are one of the biggest reasons of lost business.
When you direct your customers to shopping cart each time they add an item, they complain that it is hard for them to return back and continue shopping. Many customers afraid of clicking browser back button, since there were times when doing so you could loose the information inside your cart. Those times are gone and most modern shopping carts don’t have that problem anymore. But it is still an issue for people who had bad experience before. People tend to remember bad experiences better than good ones. Make shopping experience smooth and simple to go trough and customers will thank you by returning back.
Provide two clearly visible links that lead client to the section page where he found the item and item page where he came from. In addition to that, placing cross-sell items on the shopping cart page will help you upsell the client. Having “you may also need this products” on shopping cart page is much more effective than having it just on the item page.
With this setup you have clear and simple way for client either check out (nice easily noticeable button above the fold of the page) or continue shopping by purchasing cross-sells or going back to item page or section page where he shopped before.
Minicarts can be useful for those online merchants whose clients purchase many items at once. But they miss the opportunity to upsell clients on shopping carts. So it’s up to you to research the way your customers shop and use your online store and decide what works for your e-business.
But even such giant as Amazon although having minicart still after adding every item to cart directs people to a version of shopping cart with a lot of cross-sell items. I’m not telling that’s the way to go for everybody but it gives some thoughts about what’s effective in selling online.
The setup offered in this article is easy to build on many e-commerce platforms and definitely works on yahoo merchant solutions platform – the ecommerce platform for small and medium businesses company I work for specializes.
Related materials:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/