Practicology 2014 Website Usability Report Highlights
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Highlights from the Practicology 2014 Website Usability Report - presented at the WhatUsersDo Retail Breakfast Briefing in October 2014.
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Practicology 2014 Website Usability Report Highlights
- 1. Joanna Perry Head of Marketing Practicology
- 2. Website Usability Report 2014
- 3. Methodology Each site was evaluated in September 2014 We looked at site performance, the end-to-end customer journey as well as how customer-centric the fulfilment proposition is We focused on the UK websites of each retailer and assumed we were a consumer in the UK
- 4. The ranking
- 5. Don’t forget about your desktop site Mobile is crucial but more than half of online sales come from desktops still 36% of online retail sales are from mobile or tablet – 6.5% smartphone and 29.5% tablet 52% of traffic is from mobiles and tablets Don’t let mobile/tablet/touch site design be at the detriment of your desktop experience
- 8. Site search and findability
- 11. Product descriptions – remember SEO
- 12. Merchandising on product pages
- 13. Merchandising on product pages
- 14. Getting social
- 15. Peer pressure
- 16. Fulfilment – how competitive are you? 22 of the 25 offer buy and collect 4 offer reserve and collect 24 offer guaranteed Saturday delivery 8 offer guaranteed Sunday delivery 11 offer returns to Collect+ locations
- 17. Delivery information Do your customers fully understand the communication they will receive around delivery?
- 18. In the bag
- 19. Be my guest
- 20. Site performance
- 21. Site performance
- 22. Download the report here www.practicology.com/website-usability-report-2014 joanna@practicology.com @practicology 020 7323 0539
Editor's Notes
- Our new desktop site usability report launches tomorrow and I’m going to give you a brief overview of the findings, focusing on some of the issues that you could still change in time for Christmas, and also some things to consider for your development roadmap for 2014. This report is available for download from our website tonight, or if anyone wants to hand me their card afterwards I’ll email you a copy tomorrow.
- Site search, site merchandising, product information, delivery information and options, social commerce, the basket and checkout process We published a separate report on Mobile Site Usability in April this year, and if you are interested in this see me afterwards and I will arrange to send you a copy
- You’ll need to download the report to look at the full 25 – but here is the top 5. We used a scoring sheet with a maximum of 70.5 points this year, and House of Fraser scored the highest at 57. Our bottom scoring site was Sainsbury’s Non-food with 37.5 points.
- M&S site displays tablet option on touch-screen laptops Some responsive sites just keep expanding to fit the browser size – almost get too big and hard to look at
- In general UK retailers are pretty strong on using their homepage to demonstrate their expertise in the products they sell, provide calls to action and some also merchandise specific products or offers. ASOS is now taking this one step further with stylist live chat available in the afternoons and early evenings. Each stylist has a profile on the site as well as links to their social media feeds and it looked pretty popular when we visited the site on a weekend afternoon.
- I love this. We are seeing more brands using clickable / shoppable video – and here is one example from House of Fraser’s homepage last month. The takeaway is that inspiration is moving on from editorial style content and becoming more interactive
- If there is one takeaway on findability from this research and our mobile report from earlier this year it is that your search really needs to serve customers. If you are using the same search technology for desktop and mobile visitors this is definitely the case as search becomes a more important tool on mobile. Here we have Asda Direct’s site showing how many results for each term to stop customers going down blind alleys, Boohoo’s site showing why type-ahead search is important if your search terms are complicated – maxidress, croptop, jumpsuit etc – and B&Qs site which provides type-ahead results and merchandises products with pictures.
- Top picture is Currys product listing and bottom is Tesco Direct which shows if a product is out of stock on the listings page and has a button so you can request a stock alert. The best product listings pages allow customers to make informed choices without even needing to click through onto product pages Also customer ratings, rollover pictures etc
- This looks like a pretty boring slide, right? I haven’t come across a product description this poor for a long time, but this is from Sports Direct’s site in September. As the report says, even if you don’t care about your customers enough to provide product descriptions, do it for the SEO benefit!
- If anyone is on Google tonight searching for a 453105 they are in luck, Sports Direct is selling them, probably for a good price too. The top natural result in Google too. Look at all the free publicity gained by this excellent product description!
- The report reminds retailers that you cannot just set up intelligent merchandising systems and then leave them. If you want them to deliver then you need to be looking at the results regularly. Here’s a Boots product page – I was looking at a nail varnish set. Now I can’t imagine that there are many Boots’ customers who looked at this product and then went on to buy a caddy for their walking frame. You can’t blame the system, it’s just using the data it has got to work with, so you need to use common sense too…
- And this looks like common sense from Amazon. Not only does it merchandise relevant product but lets customers add the bundle to their basket without needing to move between different product pages. Amazon was one of our biggest risers in the ranking compared to last year, and it’s attention to detail like this that meant it scored highly.
- Many retailers have added social sharing buttons to their product pages. This allows your customers create free advertising for you. If they are signed in to their social accounts on the computer already it is pretty seamless. Here’s an example from New Look. It’s pretty good, but you can see it pulls in the product description and some of that info isn’t the type of copy you would put in an advert – so you should check what the social posts pull in and make sure that your metadescriptions and product descriptions are really selling the product. That’s one you’ve got time to do for Christmas if you haven’t already.
- Some more on social. Very is incorporating what we call social proof into its product listings. Now there are no reviews for this product, but this provides extra evidence to customers that this is in demand and creates a sense of urgency for a browser who may not have been ready to make a purchase decision yet.
- Here’s another nice example from New Look in the bag. Now it doesn’t allow you to select your delivery option in the bag and have the delivery cost added – but it does point out how much more you’d need to spend to get free delivery. It also highlights its Live Chat service here. We found other sites where Live Chat popped up when it thought you wanted help, but otherwise you might not realise that the service was there to use. This gives the customer the option of whether they want to use it at a point where they may otherwise abandon their purchase
- Currys guest checkout makes it really easy for first-time customers and I like that you can sign up for marketing emails without registering too. Six sites offered guest checkout this year. It’s good to offer if you use the same checkout for mobile as inputting details on a mobile is infinity harder. It turns the checkout process on its head a little, getting the customer through the checkout before worrying about sign-up and creating passwords etc.
- 19 of the 25 retailers passed the sub 10 second test for their homepage load speed. Only 16 passed for the category page test. Sports Direct had the slowest loading homepage – 12.56 seconds and Amazon was the best at 3.58 seconds Boohoo’s dress category page took 21.51 seconds and Amazon’s kitchen and small appliances category page took 3.3 seconds If you do one thing to improve the perceived load time then prioritise visible content, so that content important to rendering the first above the fold view is loaded first
- Boohoo’s dress category page took 21.51 seconds and Amazon’s kitchen and small appliances category page took 3.3 seconds If you do one thing to improve the perceived load time then prioritise visible content, so that content important to rendering the first above the fold view is loaded first