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Ecommerce User Experience

by Stephen Pratley on Jul 04, 2010

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A number of tools and techniques for identifying user experience problems with your website. A presentation given at the Sheerluxe Etail conference 2010

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A number of tools and techniques for identifying user experience problems with your website. A presentation given at the Sheerluxe Etail conference 2010

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EmilyHeath I like the 'nerve to ask strangers to savage your project' point under user testing requirements! 10 months ago Reply
Are you sure you want to Yes No

This is my presentation from the Sheerluxe Luxury eTail Conference 2010. Go to SheerB2B.com for details of future events.
Shine Marketing are an ecommerce specialist dealing with the needs of upmarket brandsWe have an ethos that is driven by marketing, and hence by your customers needs. We believe that a good customer experience is a good brand experience, so that should be your first hint where today’s presentation is headed…
Starts with development, either a new site or modifications to an existing one.You need traffic & sales to see if anything has changed, so if you have less than a few hundred visitors a day, promotion is your first problemYou need tools in place to measure ROI – this is where Analyitcs IS usefulThe issue is how to decide which improvements need to be made – this is the focus of this presentation.
Useful to divide the problems into 3 areasProduct Problems:Much easier to identifyProduct doesn’t work as expectedProblem may be with fit between the product and the customer. In fashion, quite literallyNot everyone will complain or return, esp in low ticket productsBusiness Problems:Proposition is unclearTarget market is not understoodNo-one wants what you have to sellStaff are poorly trained or unmotivatedCustomer service is sloppyYou can only get feedback on the customer facing problemsWebsite Problems:Users often won’t understand the difference between the website and the business.Gather feedback then decide what needs changingYour website is rarely the worst of your problems, but it is the easiest to change.
The 3 areas have very different ways of identifying the problem and coming up with solutions.Today we are going to focus on user feedback as a way to solve your website problems
The answers are with your shoppers but unlike a retail store, online shoppers are hard to talk to.Even when you do talk to them, it’s hard to get a constructive answer.You have to watch not askWhat follows are some tools & techniques to get and evaluate responses from your customers, or people like themWe’ll start with the ‘best of breed’ and follow with some quick & dirty alternatives.
Question: How many people have watched someone that they don’t know trying to shop on their site?User observation involves watching someone trying to complete a series of set tasks on your site and watching where they have difficulties.It is mainly concerned with removing the negatives aspects of your site, and identifying the problems rather than offering new solutions.Successful observation needs 3 elementsThe moderatorThe userThe test siteThe test can also take place in a dedicated test studio with 2 way mirrors, screen and voice recording, and a fridge full of wine and hors d’oeuvres, but that’s optionalThis scene could equally well take place in your own office, a quiet corner of your store, or a coffee shop.VenueMost offices are not where people feel comfortable2 way rooms allow several key team members to watch and modify the test as it progresses
Who should you test?In recruitment for B2C tests, web experience is more important than demographicsIf you sell jeans to 30 year old women, you’re better having an 18 or 60 year old who has bought jeans online, then a 30 year old who hasn’tWe can imagine being rich or poor, we can’t imagine having used the web since 1994, or not.Getting a mix of office workers(who tend to be more comfortable computer users) and homeworkers can mean running your tests in the evening.RecruitmentIf you are hiring a test suite and a moderator, you are then obliged to get your test subjects to turn up to the right place at the right timeA good user testing lab will be able to manage the recruitment for you.This is less of a problem if you run the tests yourselves on your own premises.If you have a store, then recruitment can be quite simple, just leave some invites by the till, otherwise, building a ‘panel’ of test subjects is quite a big job for a one off task.Avoid using friends and family if at all possible, they will be just too eager to tell you how wonderful everything is.
An independent facilitator is enormously usefulHow do you measure your trousers, in inches or cm?CentimetersWhat leg length are you?30 inches?What would you expect a long leg length to be?32 inches?
Perfectly possible to conduct early tests using designs only“If you were looking for a pair of jeans for this weekend, where would you click first?”Worth considering testing a set of competitor sites to see if they are as good as you think they are before “taking inspiration”At some stage you’ll want to test a full working site including a full set of product data.Leave time to both test, and to make changes before the site goes live.Prioritise based on importance but also on time/budget.Don’t panic about what this may or may not throw up. Some of the most useful changes have been very simple, e.g. changing menu labels.If the test shows you need new features, remember every feature has a cost:DevelopmentMaintenanceClutter & Confusion
A lot of the above can be dispensed with to cut costs and to ensure your tests happen frequently and early in the development cycleThe above are the basics
This book, a follow up to “Don’t make me think” is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to run their own testing sessions.Find it here:http://amzn.to/aFpCb0
Involves watching live users, but with less conscious feedbackYou’re never quite sure what their intention is,e.g. if they leave the site did they find what they want or did they just get stuck?However, watching live users is now increasingly easy and cheap using some of the tools that folow.
Allows you to watch users clicking through existing sites.Gives 10 recordings / month free which isn’t muchMost educational sessions are watching users in the checkout and seeing what errors they makeVery cheap, but doesn’t allow you to ask the user what they are trying to do.
Allows you to invite people to try tests and try basic tasks. The tasks are shown in the green strip at the top of the page and the users give comments at the end of each.Getting someone to complete a full checkout including cards can present some challengesNeeds your own panel of users or knowing where to find one. This is probably the best of the cheapo alternatives to a proper user test.
FengGui is a simulation of far more expensive eye-tracking tools to see where users focus on the page.In this example we were surprised to see the focus low down on the page. When we looks at these 2 photos we could see they are far more engaging than the others, using models with direct eye contact.Fror each page decide what the Most Wanted Action is– make sure this is highlighted.
Typical login page after the basketAsks to start creating an account or login for existing customersNice repetition of the basket gives reassurance of where you are in the journey
See where the eye lands, first on the product image, then on the credit card logos?In one test more than half the participants clicked on these logos and seemed to be thinking “now I’m going to pay for my purchase”When nothing happened, more than one participant thought the site was broken and gave up.Login pages are REALLY hard, they’re the first place you need to actually read something to make a decision.Tone down other elements and concentrate on the most wanted action
Google Analytics Overlay report shows where people click. But notice all the links to the homepage have the same numbers?This just measures where people went next, not how.It doesn’t inform the design
CrazyEgg, my most awesome alternative to analytics, shows exactly where people clicked.It can also be broken down by a number of factors such as new/repeat visitors.Much more informed design decisions can be made from these visual patterns.Not clear from here but this is a very long page with more than 50 products which gets quite even numbers of clicks.Worth testing is your designer is recommending a design that never goes “below the fold”
Customer reviews can give both feedback on products and the business.If doing it yourself structure your feedback questionnaires to gather information on both.Also smaller companies will need to be pro-active in soliciting feedbackWe have run tests with FeeFo and had excellent results of around 10% of buyers leaving comments – worth considering a service like this and we can arrange free trials if you have suitable levels of trafficNB Shine Marketing can organise very low cost product review campaigns using your recent customer data, get in touch if you’d like to try this out.
This might all sound expensive, but compared to building a new site every 2-5 years, it’s peanuts.Incremental change is also easier on your usersTweaking the website is not the silver bullet, but seeking customer feedback could be.Your website will never please all the people all the time. Your job is to make it as good as you can for as many of your profitable customers as you can.This can only be achieved by getting feedback from your customersShoppers rarely know what they want until they see it, but you can learn a lot by watchingBuilding regular user feedback into your business at all levels, no matter how informal, is better than guessing.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you create ecommerce websites that are a great experience for your users, and which can easily be found by the search engines, do get in touch.

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WaTaShia 1 year ago

Ecommerce User Experience — Presentation Transcript

Where to go when Googledoesn’t have the answersStephen Pratley
Sheerluxe ConferenceJuly 1st 2010
Shine Marketing
The Process of Improvement
Problem Areas
Identifying the problems
Where to find the answers
Live user observation
The User
The Moderator
The Test Site
User testing on the cheap
Laptop with webcam
Camtasia Studio / Silverback
Budget to reward users
A script
Nerve to ask strangers to savage your project
The DIY User Testing Bible
Option B - Remote testing
UserFly
Loop 11
FengGui
Eye Tracking on Login pages
Eye Tracking on Login pages
Googe Analytics Overlay
CrazyEgg
Customer Reviews
Summary
Break the cycle of developing whole sites
Separate product, business & website issues
No website is perfect for everyone
Watch don’t ask, to find problems
Rough tests are far better than no tests at all
Find out more
Shinemarketing.comsales@shinemarketing.com
+44 208 973 4637

Ecommerce User Experience

by Stephen Pratley on Jul 04, 2010

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Ecommerce User Experience — Presentation Transcript