Christmas Usability Thoughts

Christmas, a Time for Thinking about Toys, Presents and Bad Shopping Cart Usability

It’s the day before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for Craig as he thought about usability issues of shopping baskets.

According to a November 2008 article by Joanna Bawa, entitled “Poor Shopping Basket Usability will hinder Christmas Rush,” I’m not the only one who should be up nights worrying about bad user experiences.

According to the article:

“The latest e-retail benchmarking study from eDigitalResearch has identified customer service and online shopping basket usability as the two key areas where online retailers need to improve in order to capitalise on customer loyalty and online transactions.”

For those of you in the good ‘ol USA, shopping basket = shopping cart, and the same issues apparently dogging UK websites can and do happen across the Pond as they say, right over here.

The article continues,

“Managing the increasing levels of customer service contact (both telephone and email) is creating a challenge for many e-retailers. Although the majority of those surveyed by eDigitalResearch said that they expect a response within 24 hours of sending an email, many businesses are leaving customers frustrated by being unable to provide such a service. It is clearly imperative that this is improved upon; otherwise brand loyalty will be at risk.

The other aspect of e-commerce that the survey identified as cause for customer complaint was poor functionality of the shopping basket process and delivery options. The eRetail study identified Figleaves.com as the overall leader with top league table performance in a number of key performance areas including search functionality, product descriptions shopping basket usability and purchase and delivery fulfilment.”

It’s probably a bit late now, after all there’s only about a half-day to Christmas (depending on what time zone you live in), but it’s never too late to think about shopping basket usability, and how to improve it. So with the whole “spirit of giving” thing going on, I’ll share with you three ideas to quickly and simply identify where usability issues may be causing problems with your shopping basket or cart. Feel free to use these ideas during your family’s Christmas celebration, or if that feels a bit too work-related and not in the spirit of the season, just hold off on these until you get back to work:

Three Quick Tips to Improving Shopping Basket Usability

1. Do a Quick & Dirty Usability Test:
   Ask you neighbor, a friend or relative to give you a gift, a free gift of usability testing. Ask them to try to order something on your website, using your shopping basket. No, they don’t have to complete the process, but ask them to go as far as they can without actually ordering the product. Observe (force yourself to remain calm and quiet) as they go through the process. Ask them their opinions of whether the experience met their expectations, or not. And if not, ask them where they think the problems were. Do three of these quick and dirty usability tests, using people who would typically shop your site, and you’ll be armed with more than enough usability information to follow-up with after you get back to work.

2. Read your customer service emails or listen to calls:
   If you have access to customer service emails or recorded phone calls, this is a treasure-trove of usability presents for you. At TouchCommerce, I have access to hundreds of thousands of chat transcripts (we’re in the live sales chat business, it’s not a creepy spy thing or anything). Read what your actual customers have to say, you’ll find it easy to find lots of comments about all kinds of usability issues. However, remember that your customers don’t know exactly what went wrong, so sometimes it’s necessary to take educated guesses as to where the problems are. Recorded calls with customers seeking customer service help while trying to order will be another goldmine of usability presents for you.
3. Analyze Top Exit Pages by Percentage, not Number of Exits:
   If you have access to your web statistics data, from Hitbox or Webtrends or Omniture or whatever, prioritize where your problems lurk by looking at the numbers. The key thing to consider is on which page or step in your ordering process is the Percentage of loss the greatest. Why percentage? Because almost all order flows have much greater loss at the beginning of the process vs near the end of the process. Thus, if your percentage of loss is highest right near the final steps in the ordering process, you may wish to focus there first, to try to have the biggest impact on conversion.

Conclusion: Give Yourself a Usability Gift

So, celebrate Christmas (if you’re of the Christmas celebrating persuasion) by giving your shopping basket the gift of usability. You’ll feel better, your customers will feel better and you’ll have that warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing you’re doing something to make a difference.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

For more information:
Read the Usability News Article about Poor Shopping Basket Usability
Read the eDigitalResearch News Release