PRWD Launch Our 1st Best Practice Driven E-commerce Site using UCDcommerce
I am absolutely delighted to announce the 1st phase launch of PRWD’s bespoke e-commerce platform, UCDcommerce, with our 1st client to use the platform being one of our long term clients, Contact Packaging.
The e-commerce site, selling a complete range of packaging materials and supplies, from masking tape and bubble wrap through to cardboard boxes and stretch wrapping machinery, has been designed by myself and developed by one remarkable technical architect and developer, Sam Clark. You may like to read Sam Clark’s initial thoughts on the e-commerce platform.
At this stage you may be wondering ‘why develop a completely new framework and platform when there are so many existing e-commerce providers out there?‘.
And my answer, as user experience director of PRWD, is this…
Our clients, both existing and potential, demand a scalable, best practice driven, intelligent and user focused e-commerce platform on which PRWD can develop bespoke e-commerce solutions to revolutionise their business online.
To give an example as to the type of e-commerce platform which may have supported this answer, our 1 main consideration was becoming a partner with Elastic Path, who have developed E-commerce Software which is used by the likes of Samsonite and Bond & Bond. BTW having looked at these 2 e-commerce sites I must stress they don’t follow our principles on e-commerce findability and user experience, but they may be worth a look all the same.
Complete control over the evolution of our E-commerce Platform
Rather than the partner route, our commercial decision was to develop a new framework (fortnum) and in-house platform, to ensure we had complete control of how the e-commerce platform would evolve, in key areas such as:
- customer intelligence
- CRM system integrations
- user functionality
- user engagement
- embracing and integrating with new technologies
The launch site is only the very start of what will technically be a continually drive in tackling the areas above, and in user experience is just our 1st interpretation of what will drive online sales for this particular client.
There are currently some known usability flaws which need addressing, of which I’m sure other usability professionals will recognise, but with this e-commerce store being in its launch phase there will be scope and budget to address them going forward.
In time I intend posting articles explaining the user centered design process that was adopted during this 1st development, with features on particular areas of the site including:
- user centered navigation and findability
- user engagement
- learnability
- consumer browsing behaviour targeting
- addressing security concerns
- the best practice driven checkout process
Comments please…!
I welcome comments from any readers of my blog and other usability professionals and technical architects and developers - and most importantly comments from online shoppers!
Tags: best practice, UCDcommerce
11:58 pm
20th April 2008
Hi Paul,
I’ve had a look over and after reading Sam’s blog I get where you guys are coming from with your solution but here’s a few things I’ve noticed about the site:
- The overuse of Century Gothic became quite jarring, I found it more difficult to read after a while - more than a standard web-safe alternative.
- I liked the fact that the layout was fluid and there’s some nice use of jQuery on there. Fixed/fluid might be a good evolution of that.
- The design has a rough edge to it, like I’m not sure how well the space is used and it can seem quite inconsistent.
- It was confusing for a while when you click onto a single product to see something that looked like a shopping basket, which actually turned out to be a form to add to the shopping basket. The description and details were ‘below the fold’ (although I’m not keen on that term) and the image(s) seemed dissociated from the main content.
- Different page templates seemed to use the space in a different way, which took a while to adjust to (therefore slow learnability of the site).
- When I clicked onto Sale Items, one of the prices was hidden by the blue oval and the percentages weren’t rounded off (nitpicking I know!).
- There’s no pagination on search results (type ‘e’ and see 50+ listed) and as a customer I’d like to see a bit more info, like maybe the category it’s in with results taking up less space and the ability to reorder/filter the list (a-z, z-a, by category, popularity, etc)
- If there are no products in the shopping basket, shouldn’t the ‘proceed to checkout’ button be hidden?
- With the nature of the products having many potential variations, the system handles them really well and allows for very specific discounts, which is great.
- Going to the checkout lost all of the navigation, which doesn’t seem to consider the alternative routes people might take such as adding another item, checking terms and conditions/delivery charges or saving the cart for later.
- The log-in, register forms were really clean and clear!
- Contact Us - there’s no contact form but the email addresses are published. Might be safer from spammers to have a form with strong validation over showing emails. The query could still be routed to the correct department or office.
- I’d like to have seen use of RSS (top sellers, new items, special offers) as well as use of microformats for address/contact info (hCard) and each product’s review (hReview). With Yahoo and others starting to use these it would seem an ideal time to build them into a new system!
- Good use of hidden ’skip links’ but maybe more could be added for search, tags, etc and repeat them at the bottom of the page. I’d also be tempted to wrap the search form in a fieldset with a legend to be sure it was as accessible as possible but maybe that’s overkill!
Just a few thoughts - hopefully any criticisms as being too scathing because I can see that under the hood there’s some great work gone into this!
Cheers,
Dan
11:37 am
21st April 2008
Hi Dan,
Thanks very much for taking the time to have a real good look through the site and the user experience currently provided.
You have made some really valid points, and the majority of them are issues which we do intend to address during the next few months, such as:
a more user friendly search results page
cleaning up of the single SKU product page
the disabling of the checkout button if no products are in your basket
RSS feeds (especially once site traffic is increasing as we now begin marketing the site)
One area which was fully intended to be displayed how you see it is the checkout process. The template change, based on checkout best practice, may feel quite strange to alot of people, but the reason for this is that there are hardly any sites that follow this best practice.
Crucial areas such as security guarantees, delivery information and company contact information are given much more valuable real estate, any un-necessary links to take people out of the checkout process have been removed, and a new, clear, breadcrumb process bar is provided.
All these features have been included to minimise checkout abandonment rates, and checkout best practice is an area I intend to post an article on in due course.
Moving forward with the platform we are planning to introduce a 1 page checkout for standard compliant browsers which will take the current checkout to the next stage, but again this will take alot of customers some getting used to with the traditional 3/4/5 pages of a checkout process being the norm.
To conclude, thankyou once again for your very constructive comments, they were really appreciated!
Paul
3:03 pm
21st April 2008
Hi Paul,
No problem at all! It’s pretty good fun having a critical head on looking at a site - I think it can help you to apply that same part of your brain to your own work.
It’s possible that the security guarantees more stable real estate as their placement seemed different on each layout/template. These should be present to reassure people but also have a clear delineation between advice and content?
I agree with you about the best practise with the checkout and I’d like to read your article once it’s published but I think that while the template should change somewhat and lose most unnecessary links, maybe the current screen goes too far?
A store absolutely doesn’t want to have loads of abandoned carts, so locking people into a step-by-step process certainly trains their thinking. I think though there’s a balance with the design changing so much - maybe use navigation bar styling for the steps of the process to keep the look and feel consistent; have a collapsible list of relative information under the action pane to prevent people leaving the area but still providing information relevant to their context.
As jQuery is used, it may be worth looking at making this a faster process by having this as a tabbed screen for each step, which degrades to a step-by-step page. Although I’d sure this will have it’s own problems (with validation over several panes for example).
Certainly a ’save cart’ option (if the cookie doesn’t already relate to the cart contents in the database) would also help with cart abandonment. Amazon for one has this - you can wonder away from the site but your cart will remain for a while (or forever if you’re logged in). Definitely useful if you need to check a warehouse or run out of time and have a large shopping cart full!
Cheers,
Dan
4:53 pm
21st April 2008
Hi Dan,
Just a note about the shopping basket. All users items are stored in the DB straight away even if you’re not logged in, so you can return to your basket at a later date for upto six months. When you login or register, the basket items are automatically assigned to your uid.
The system periodically cleans out any carts that haven’t been touched for that long.
Cheers, Sam
5:46 pm
21st April 2008
Hi Sam,
There’s clearly a lot of good work gone into the system so congratulations on getting it launched!
It’s clear how it can keep getting even better in the future.
Cheers,
Dan
3:28 pm
22nd April 2008
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your further comments on security and the checkout process.
Sam’s comments were very useful in a response to the ’save cart’ topic, and he has just posted an in-depth article on the security principles adopted for the store, which you may be interested to read.
With reference to your point on making the registration/checkout quicker, I presume you are kind of referencing the area which I touched on in my earlier comment, regarding one of the evolving aspects of the platform which will be integrating a one-page checkout process for standard compliant browsers.
I intend discussing the pros and cons of this in my future article on the checkout process.
Thanks again for your comments!
Paul
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