white paper - usability

The opportunities and the threats for online retailers

White Paper

Usability { The opportunities and the threats for online retailers }

Online retailing is no arena for the fainthearted - the winners are the ones who commit to constant improvement and action in enhancing the usability of their sites. And for the losers, the threats to their online businesses are very real indeed...

Contents

Accessible to all, usable by all! 3 - 5

Building a lead 6 - 7

The penalties of inaction 8 - 9

Looking ahead 10 - 11

Learn more about usability 12


Contents / 2

Roll up, roll up! Accessible to all, usable by all!During 2008 US retail giant Target agreed to a staggering payout in California, where it has allegedly transgressed federal anti-discrimination legislation that requires website owners to give blind people full access to their sites’ functionality1.

We haven’t yet seen a case in the UK on a remotely similar scale, but our own anti-discrimination laws make it just a matter of time until one emerges.

But such an extreme example actually represents merely the tip of a far, far bigger iceberg that continues to cost online retailers untold billions every year: a failure to make their sites not just accessible to all, but easily usable by everyone as well.


Accessible to all, usable by all / 3

1 http://pressroom.target.com/pr/news/target-web/target-nfb-settlement.aspx, August 27th 2008

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UsabilityAt its very simplest, usability defines how good a website is at providing all customers with a service they can use easily and effectively. It therefore relates primarily to the quality, simplicity and functionality of the user interface, and is also used as a touchstone within the design process to enable ease-of-use.

Critically, it needs to be developed alongside the closely related attribute of ‘utility’, which enables consumers to do what they wish to do on your site.

So working together, usability and utility enable people to do what they want, easily and efficiently with a minimum of errors.

An increasingly important feature of usability that’s emerging as a competitive consideration of real consequence is that of satisfaction. If two competing sites offer precisely the same products and functionality, it will clearly be the one that’s most enjoyable to use that will emerge victorious. This is particularly important for those retailers seeking to avoid pandering to the lowest common denominator and appeal to a sophisticated and demanding audience.

Definitions



Accessibility Accessibility, meanwhile, is a subset of usability, generally held to be about ensuring that sites are usable by people with disabilities, who cannot operate standard user agents or settings or browsers/platforms with limited/turned-off features eg JavaScript.

Enabling accessibility involves many techniques that mostly comprise providing alternatives to the standard user interface. These can include using screen readers to vocalise text and enable visually impaired people to type, colour contrasts that make differentiation easier, clear typography, the ability to alter text sizes and more. The technology is constantly improving too. For example, Google now also has some ability to read Flash, making it accessible to Screen Readers and hence to blind and visually impaired people.

In the UK, the legislation that enforces accessibility falls under the Disabilities Discrimination Act 2005 (DDA), which among much else requires that organisations make their information easy to access. Naturally, website accessibility is just one element of the wider legislation, but it is nonetheless highly significant for online businesses because it applies to all employers and everyone who provides a service to the public (except the Armed Forces).

So far, so straightforward. But online retailers also have a pressing need to promote and differentiate themselves through the style, look and feel of their websites – in other words, to deliver ‘satisfaction’ while complying with the demands of accessibility.

In fact, a recent US survey of 300 leading online retailers, showed that across a range of 69 different usability and customer-experience factors they scored an average of just 2.

According to the survey, were using text that was hard to read; enforced four or more steps in the checkout process; and just offered customer reviews, proven to be a very popular and effective means of giving customers the impartial information they want.

Naturally, there’s no legal punishment for having, for example, awkward and illogical navigation menus. But there is an immense penalty nonetheless – the stark fact that visitors will leave in droves without making a purchase.

2 Future Now, 2007



Ironically, the issue here is not so much how retailers can cater for the needs of inexperienced users and people with low-spec computers. Commercially, it’s more important that they satisfy the creativity and functionality expectations of their more sophisticated customers. These, after all, are likely to be the people with most money to spend, and who are most likely to shop online.

This is dangerous territory, however, progressively bringing retailers closer to a line that excludes some users – possibly including people with disabilities – from using the site properly. And Target’s example shows the dangers inherent in getting the balance wrong.

These are just some of the reasons why many major eCommerce businesses are continuing to grapple with the usability and accessibility conundrum: if we have to serve the lowest common denominator, can we ever challenge and stretch the creative and service boundaries to help maximise commercial value and impact?

The answer, fortunately, is ‘yes’ – by getting the balance right, you can keep all of the people happy all of the time. And many of our market-leading online retailers are achieving precisely that.

But it’s not always easy and there is much to consider.

Internet guru Jakob Nielsen has probably expressed the need for usability as well as anyone ever has: On the web, usability is a necessary condition for survival, he writes. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what the company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave.3

“Note a pattern here?”

To make things even tougher for online retailers, particularly those operating in the mass market, there’s an overriding need to cater simultaneously for audiences with wildly different levels of online experience and expertise, from novice to expert.

Not only that – the range of hardware quality and modernity in use, also means that a feature which might fly on one computer may cause another to crash.

3 useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s website

Building a leadThe most successful online retailers are the ones who have most effectively managed this balancing act. And their focus has been first and foremost on meeting the usability requirements of their primary audiences, including satisfaction.

To this end, they’re committed to the use of creative skills and creative technologies, but they are successfully balancing the creative with the technical to ensure that they use technology innovatively to engage the consumer without sacrificing usability. This is a key factor in front-end development that simultaneously ensures an ever-improving experience for consumers and promotes the retailer’s brand.

Increasingly, this is becoming just as relevant for mobile eCommerce as for its longer established ‘fixed’ form, where retailers are making significant investments in ensuring that their sites are satisfying and usable for users of the growing number of mobile browsers.

So it is by concentrating on constant improvement that the leaders keep ahead of the curve and encourage increasing numbers of loyal customers to keep returning and spending.

What’s more, their approach is often neither particularly difficult nor prohibitively expensive.

Quite simply, they know their customers and they understand the potential (and limitations) of online retailing. So, first and foremost, they provide their customers with choice, providing different means of navigation that suit the needs of people with differing levels of experience, expertise, browser age, hardware sophistication and, just as important, personal preference.

Next, they keep up-to-date with new technologies and ensure that they use them to best and most relevant effect, with back-up alternatives in place. In the early days of Flash, for example, many website developers saw this new tool as a universal panacea that would add excitement and creativity to any site. The result, after an initial flush of user delight, was growing impatience as sites loaded slowly and prevented users from getting into the site as quickly as they wished. The lesson has been learned, and no good developer today lets technology get in the way of the user’s ability to use their sites.

The focus today, rather, is on using best practice and new technologies to streamline the user’s experience by making their interaction with a site swifter and more intuitive than ever before.


Building a lead / 6

Recent years, for example, have seen the increasing use of Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) – a development tool that allows users to interact with a website in a manner similar to a desktop application, for example by providing a meaningful response to some input without reloading the page, as in providing a drag and drop facility. One of the first examples of Ajax in action to reach a wide audience, in fact, was Google Maps, which enabled users to move an image of a map around their screen, enabling them to ‘improve’ a web page to match their personal preferences.

However, improvements in usability extend beyond the immediate efficiency of a site, to encompass areas including payment security and streamlined fulfilment. Online security remains a major concern for users, and evidence that a site is using the most effective available solution – such as PayPal or Google Checkout – adds to their willingness to provide financial information.

Likewise, a poor experience of late delivery (or non-delivery) lingers in the user’s memory, possibly delivering terminal damage to the customer relationship. Offering services like estimated delivery time, timely email support and information, free shipping, in-stock availability and even, where possible, an in-store pick-up option all contribute to usability.

Then there’s testing.

Online market leaders do not depend alone on their own opinions and preferences to drive change and improvement. Rather, they use the direct customer feedback that they constantly receive through using real-time techniques that A/B and Multi-Variate testing (MVT) offer, to gain rigorous data on what helps consumers swiftly and efficiently make a successful purchase.

Using sophisticated analytics, they can therefore spot precisely which elements of the site are underperforming – those showing higher than average bounce rates, for example, or revealing search terms that do not produce a result for the user – and use an array of alternative approaches to identify and implement the most effective.

And, of course, they take their responsibilities under the DDA very seriously indeed. No one enjoys paying needless financial penalties.

In other words, the leaders are constantly investing in the usability of their websites: they remember what Jakob Nielsen had to say on the subject. “Usability is a necessary condition for survival.” And this constant commitment is one of the most important factors behind their success.


Building a lead / 7

The penalties of inactionAs Nielsen also points out, people don’t need much of an excuse to leave a website. Equally, they don’t need much of one to decide (consciously or unconsciously) never to return. All too often, though, this decision is not taken due to the actions of an online retailer: it’s more often thanks to their inaction.

For customers respond positively to change – at least when that change represents progress. A site that does not constantly change and refresh itself – new features, new designs, new products – will gradually lose its appeal.

And when it loses its appeal, it will lose its customers too. When visitors perceive that the site has not changed since their last visit, bounce rates will increase as they leave before making a purchase. The home page is the most important consideration here – if there is no regular change here, visitors will assume that nothing else has changed either. They will reject the site as a worthwhile destination to return to. And over time it will lose custom.

Inaction is not the only danger, however. Change that is too dramatic and rapid can equally prove to be a source of aggravation among consumers. They are creatures of habit, and those who become loyal customers have learned over time to like a site’s overall approach, look and feel. So while subtle change – sometimes so discreet that the visitor may not even consciously notice it – can boost visitor and business volumes, sweeping change can be destructive.

There is therefore a careful balancing act involved, designed simultaneously to provide the reassurance of familiarity with a site’s image and how it works without allowing boredom to erode its customer-base.

Similarly, there is a danger of over-reacting to users’ desire for satisfaction.

This is where another balancing act comes into play: it is important not to provide so much free information and entertainment that visitors start using the site simply for that satisfaction, and not to buy the goods and services that you want to sell.


The penalties of inaction / 8

Turning to the issue of accessibility, the potential for being prosecuted under the DDA is clearly an important risk factor that online retailers will act to avoid. But this is not the only benefit of compliance.

First, people with disabilities are clearly potential customers for most retailers, and are therefore an important subset within a larger market. What’s more, the PR and word of mouth benefits of providing a site that’s easily accessible to them are likely to carry considerable clout with their peers, friends and family, while the damage to the reputation of a site that does the bare legal minimum (or even less!) is also likely to be disproportionally serious.

A third factor, with possibly even more commercial importance, relates to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The ‘bots’ used by major search engine like Google read sites in much the same way as a blind user does, meaning that the more accessible your site is, the higher its quality score will be. On the other hand, an inaccessible site will be marked down, with an impact on its search engine visibility.

These, then, are some of the ‘easy’ lessons that market leaders have learned and applied over the years. The consistency of their commitment to positive change is continuing to open the gap ever further between their fortunes and those of their less successful competitors.

But nothing that we’ve covered so far is unavailable to every online retailer that takes its business seriously. Any retailer can do this – the technology and the experience is widely available and cost-effective to apply.


The penalties of inaction / 9

Looking aheadBut while this capacity is available to most, the leaders continue to invest in the ‘harder’ stuff as well, using advanced technologies to protect and extend their lead. In the UK, for example, online clothes retailer New Look is using ‘eyeball analysis technology’ which enables them to identify how users eyes move as they use their site, literally enabling their page designs to be as eye, and attention, grabbing as possible.

As well as constantly researching and acting on subjects like basket-size optimisation and new means of improving security, such leaders are also exploring the potential of new and emerging technologies.

These include the ‘Ribbon’ navigation strip launched in Microsoft’s Office 2007 suite, that eliminates the need for various hierarchies of drop-down menus, and the internet browser plug-in Silverlight, which includes features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback to compete with programs like Flash and Shockwave.

But, for the leaders, one area more than any other is grabbing the attention – mobile e-commerce, often called mCommerce.

It’s already with us, of course. According to Nielsen research from spring 2008, some Americans have already made a purchase using a mobile device, and around half of the cell-phone owners in that country are willing to make one in the near future.4

But, despite the increasing prevalence of devices like the iPhone which can render websites on the palm-top, problems with issues like image size and bandwidth remain an issue for many retailers. However, emerging solutions like Magento – that optimises presentation and functionality for the iPhone’s browser – are addressing these difficulties to bring mCommerce into the mainstream.

Fortunately, as more retailers make the move, they are being able to ‘mobilise’ many of the usability lessons they’ve learned the hard way over the last decade, powering ever-swifter mCommerce adoption by users to the point, not far in the future, where it becomes ubiquitous.


Looking ahead / 104 June, 2009. www.nielsenmobile.com/html/press%20releases/M-Commerce.html

So, online retailing is no arena for the fainthearted – the winners are the ones who commit to constant improvement and action in enhancing the usability of their sites.

Just as important, there’s no fooling the consumer. They can intuitively recognise a site that has made the investments they want, in satisfaction, security and more. This adds to their comfort in using a site, and has a positive effect on their perception of the brand – both of which contribute to improved conversion rates, higher average order values, reduced rates of return and other key commercial performance factors.

The opportunity is there for everyone to apply the good practice that drives such improvements. And the threats involved in not doing so are very real indeed.


Looking ahead / 11

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Learn more about usability / 12

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white paper - usability

Technology

leading online retailers

different usability

enhancingthe usability

subset of usability

definitions usability

website accessibility

blind people

thedemands of accessibility