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Take the Time to Stand Back and Smell the Website |
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Written by Edward Mandla
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Tuesday, 04 April 2006 |
If the thought of using the checkout at your favourite online stores causes you to break into a cold sweat, then rest assured you are not alone.
Poorly designed checkouts, along with cluttered pages, missing links, "404" errors and searches that produce nonsense results are among the biggest usability mistakes many web designers make.
Companies defend their websites to the end. For many, they are creative works of art. For traditional-technology people, they are the equivalent of good, old-fashioned spaghetti code - no structure and the more you tweak the less usable it becomes.
In the dotcom era, marketing ruled websites. They were seen as a place where design and graphics were of paramount importance. Six-digit investments were seen as the development starting point. Today, many of those remaining masterpieces show their heritage with the flash intro skip button. Did we really marvel at those intros? I think it might be like '70s clothes - we cringe and deny we wore flairs.
According to Nigel Dearing, the executive producer of carpoint.com.au, making the assumption your website is a ripper is the heart of the problem. "How could the users not get it?"
Mr Dearing and his team thought they had a good site. They spent four months on a new approach, plugged it with the best components and built a prototype. Three pieces of their wisdom stand out as a message to all: have the IT people drive the process, keep marketing out of the user interface and engage others to scrutinise the end result.
CarPoint engaged Usability One to take its creation for a test drive. The results were startling. Assumptions were rife, as were inconsistent characteristics. At stake were customers dropping off and going to competitors' sites.
Part of the new way of thinking meant saying goodbye to those irritating dropdown boxes. Yet what the study found was that users are conditioned to see a dropdown box as a starting point.
This meant they needed to retain the boxes, also have the new search box called "feeling lucky" and gently educate users into a better way. Users have a video on how to better use the site and are seamlessly introduced to dynamic navigation, which follows them with recently viewed lists and corrections to common spelling errors such as convertable and convertible - they both work. Soon users learn to appreciate the ability to drill down and drill back up without starting again. Users have their options expanded by mixing new and used cars rather than being confined to one type.
The results speak for themselves. According to Nielsen, CarPoint grew 15 per cent in February and 10 per cent more in March.
To complete the strategy, user feedback is taken seriously, with a dedicated support person who surprises people by calling them back whenever possible. This is a change to the black-hole feedback approach that most companies have in my experience.
Usability One made 10 recommendations and CarPoint instigated nine. The biggest challenge was the usual technology fight up front, which was convincing executives independent consultants were required. The takeaway message from CarPoint is each $1000 spent on usability produced $10,000 in savings and that they wouldn't have had the growth without the study.
The chief executive of Usability One, Shefik Bay, says organisations consistently fall into the trap of inward thinking to fulfil their business objectives. A "five-page application form may make sense on paper but it kills the consumer experience and they go elsewhere".
"Most organisations spend more on their intranet than their website. They rush websites out and keep making changes on the fly."
Keeping customers out of call centres and reducing drop-off at the checkout by 5 per cent can add up to millions. Mr Bay says most companies have in excess of 50 per cent dropout and pointlessly asking users who "just want to buy" to create a user ID and password is checkout suicide.
First published in the Age/Sydney Morning Herald on 04 April, 2006
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