Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

Using PRWD’s benchmarking application I have recently published an article on Econsultancy, looking at both Amazon and The Book Depository. The title of the article is Amazon relying on brand credibility instead of good usability.

This article will be followed by another one on our blog which will benchmark other retailers in the book market, and I’m looking forward to comparing how well pure-play retailers such as these 2 compare with bricks-and-mortar retailers such as Borders, Waterstones and WH Smiths.

The article on Econsultancy was set-up as follows:

If ever a retailer could get away with having exceptional cross-selling and up-selling functionality, yet provide a new visitor checkout process and web forms that break many usability rules, Amazon is certainly one of them. On the other hand one of Amazon’s competitors, The Book Depository, certainly appears to focus more on providing better usability throughout the buying journey, especially for new customers.

Following the recent e-commerce training course I delivered for Econsultancy, the usability benchmarking that is part of the course threw up some really interesting market insights. Although many retailers are featured in the course, providing examples of good and bad e-tail usability and best practice, I purposely refrained from including Amazon.

The simple reason was that as they are one the largest and most recognised online retailers, with the vast majority of their customers repeat buyers (I suspect), shoppers are much more likely to persevere during their shopping journey, even if there are more usability barriers than other ’smaller’ retailers.

How Amazon and The Book Depository compare…

Below are 2 of the graphs featured in the full article which provide an overview of how both retailers perform across key areas of the buying journey:

Amazon usability

Amazon usability benchmarking graph from PRWD

The Book Depository usability

The Book Depository usability benchmarking graph from PRWD

Take a look at the full article on Econsultancy to see more detailed benchmark reports along with some commentary as to what these retailers are (or are not) doing well from a usability and best practice POV.
In addition to this article within the next few weeks we will be interviewing The Book Depository to gain more insights into their approach to developing and improving their e-commerce platform, in particular when it comes to their conversion rates.

PRWD’s Benchmarking Application

You may have already read this if you have seen the full article and comments on the Econsultancy article, but if not below are a couple of insights into our benchmarking application in terms of its intelligence and flexibility:

• weighting of different recommendations as to their impact on usability/customer confidence
• weighting of different recommendations based on the type/size/age of business – ie. high street brand, pureplay retailer, start-up

If you would like to have your own e-commerce site benchmarked for usability and best practice against some of your competitors then please get in touch with us…

Last night I attended a fantastic event with Manchester Fashion Network, a Q&A evening with River Island’s CEO Richard Bradbury.

Richard has certainly ‘done his time in retail’ as he’s worked his way up from his retail position in Great Yarmouth all the way through to becoming the Chief Executive Officer at leading fashion retail company River Island. At River Island Richard is responsible for the growth and expenditure of the continued success of the multi million pound turn-over that the top high street retailer secures.

It was a Q&A style evening, attended by around 90 people, where Richard talked very openly about his background, the River Island story and how it was originally born from the Chelsea Girl brand, the growth and importance of online for River Island, along with a range of questions from the floor, including a couple from me.

Questions ranged from what advice Richard would give to aspiring fashion designers (including a group from Manchester Met that I was sat with), how can new supplier’s best get their foot in the door and compete against supplier’s in the far east and eastern Europe, along with me asking about the their online operation.

My 2 questions where:

PR: You have mentioned about how successful your e-commerce site is for River Island. Can you provide some insights into what growth you have seen over the last 2 years with online, and what % of sales come through this channel compared to the high street?

In response Richard replied:

RB: Online is hugely significant for our business and is growing constantly, although I can’t share more than that! We have won awards for our website and we are currently on the 3rd generation.

PR: Your website is flash based, which is almost exclusive in the online retail sector. Is this an intended differentiator for your business (Richard had earlier talked about some of the ways River Island ‘do things differently’ and ‘do what works for them and their customers’), and what else can you tell us about your approach to online?

RB: We are actually in the process of moving away from our current flash based retail site. This evolvement has taken longer than we had anticipated although we are due to launch our new site later this year.

Later in the evening after the official Q&A’s had finished I grabbed a few more minutes with Richard, (who I must say is one of the most down to earth CEO’s I have had the pleasure of speaking to!) where I asked a few more questions regarding their e-commerce operation and the strategy for moving onto a much more trackable, personalised and best practice driven e-commerce operation.

Without disclosing too much here Richard shared some really interesting insights, and I’ll be watching with interest to see how 2009 shapes up for River Island business, in what is extremely challenging market conditions.

Thanks to everyone who came to last nights usability event that we sponsored in Manchester, Usability: What’s The Use? There was around 100 people in all which was great to see.

Full event details and resources

You can view further information from my presentations, including the video clip on User-centered design from a companies perspective, at the events page on our main business site.

In addition below are the presentations I gave on the night…

An introduction to usability

Usability for customer facing websites

Usability for internal software systems

Ted Dziuba has some strong opinions that I don’t always agree with, but he hits the nail on the head with his latest post about corporate blogging:

Mint is a personal finance web product that competes with desktop apps like Quicken. Mint publishes longer articles about personal finance to their blog, and have several thousand readers. That alone is interesting, but not mind-blowing. The trick is that their content is useful. It’s basically a magazine about personal finance without the advertisements. Social media picks up on Mint’s content, and it gets a lot of inbound links.

Why is this important? It matters because those inbound links create PageRank for the pages being linked to. PageRank is Google’s system of ranking the relevance and importance of content and thus determines which sites appear near the top of search results (other search engines employ very similar algorithms). Basically, each page gets a certain amount of PageRank points for every inbound link (and inbound links from pages which themselves have high PageRank count for more). Popular blog posts get a lot of PageRank and they do so reliably. Pages then ’spend’ their PageRank points in outgoing links. So, if your blog post gets 20 inbound links for a total of, say, 30 ‘points’, those points can be redistributed to other pages simply by linking to them. And this is how PageRank gets distributed from the blog (which is not part of the company’s core business) to their main product information and sales-generating pages, which most definitely are part of the core business. Pages about your products which would never normally get good PageRank can suddenly be boosted up by the links from your blog which does have good PageRank.

The crucial point here is that all the blog needs to do is get inbound links. The content provided doesn’t really have to sell the company’s products, in fact it doesn’t even have to be about the company’s products, although that certainly helps. What matters is that the content should be interesting and attractive to a wide audience who will then link to it and help to promote the company by doing so.

Creating that kind of content isn’t easy though. Many corporate blogs fall down because they’re either:

• Thinly-veiled reproductions of press releases
• Simple company news and announcements
• Badly or indifferently written

Ted’s advice is this:

If you hire a writer to post on your corporate blog, you could be seeing this kind of traffic, too. By “writer”, I don’t mean “Peggy in accounts receivable who majored in English thirty years ago”. No, I mean someone whose words are worth reading. A decent freelancer will run you 50 cents per word. A good length blog post is 1,000 words, and you should publish at least once per week. 5 posts like this per month will cost $2,500.

That’s not cheap. But compared to many marketing budgets, even in crunch times, it’s not hugely expensive either. And it may compare quite well with paying for AdWords:

Now let’s compare that to buying traffic from Google by bidding on these keywords. A really, really conservative estimate of a bid price for keywords like this is 10 cents (but good luck ranking with that bid, cheapskate). To buy 100,000 uniques would therefore cost you $10,000 per month, and you don’t get the PageRank.

The numbers are pretty clear. The $2,500 spent on a blogger in a month could quite realistically bring in 100,000 visitors if the content is good enough and is promoted properly on social network sites (a copywriter who understands SEO can do this for you and it will cost almost nothing). The same $2,500 spent on AdWords, on the cheapest keywords you can find, will bring in only 25,000 visitors.

The killer point, which Ted doesn’t elaborate fully on, is that the blog is a gift that keeps on giving. Here on the PRWD blog, some of our best traffic and even new inbound links come from posts we wrote months ago. With AdWords, once you stop the campaign or cut the budget, the traffic dies off. A good blog is a resource that people will keep visiting and linking to even if you’re no longer updating it as often. It’s a much more flexible resource:

• The posts themselves can help to promote you
• The pages on your business site that are linked to from the blog will gain good PageRank
• None of this disappears if you cut the budget
• Works for all search engines, not just Google

After a few months, the PageRank effect really kicks in, and you start to see your profile in search engines improve. Not only will you get the traffic from people coming to read blog posts, but the rest of your site will get a lift from higher rankings in Google (and other search engine) searches.

So, when you’re considering the most efficient marketing spend for your company, a good professionally-written blog might be a better choice than AdWords.

Just as Twitter, the short-form blogging service beloved by technophiles and celebrities, has succumbed to a phishing attack (source: Telegraph), what better time for me to start tweeting!

If you’re interested my username is paulrouke (surprisingly enough) – don’t expect too many tweets but I certainly intend on sharing little insights into what I get up to day-to-day when I get chance.