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…

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.

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

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.

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.

The Usability Professionals Association, an international industry group, provides a definition of user-centered design which includes the following development cycle, codified in the ISO standard 13407:

1. Specify the context of use
   Identify the people who will use the product, what they will use it for, and under what conditions they will use it.
2. Specify requirements
   Identify any business requirements or user goals that must be met for the product to be successful.
3. Create design solutions
   This part of the process may be done in stages, building from a rough concept to a complete design.
4. Evaluate designs
   The most important part of this process is that evaluation – ideally through usability testing with actual users – is as integral as quality testing is to good software development.

This process still leaves a substantial part of the development process open to discussion. In particular, it doesn’t make any specific reference to the technical implementation of a project. Since that’s my responsibility, that’s where my interest lies! However, there are many development methods which are a good fit for UCD, and this includes the ‘Agile’ development methodologies.

Agile software development comprises a group of related approaches to software development which attempt to overcome many of the problems faced by traditional software development processes. The fundamental tenets of Agile Development are set out in the Agile Manifesto, and the approach is summarised as follows:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

In short, Agile development is based on the notion that software development processes can be unpredictable and that the bigger they are, the less predictable they become. Agile offers us some important insights into how to manage that process on a dynamic basis, rather than try to eliminate all uncertainty with a huge and detailed up-front plan. As a result, Agile development can cut costs and cut delivery time by placing the emphasis on delivery and quality, working with customers on a good faith basis rather than by setting down overly strict requirements at the start which may bind both parties in ways that neither wants. And this is a very good fit for user-centered design, because it leaves open the possibility of incorporating user feedback as the project gets underway.

One of the 12 principles of Agile Development is this: Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage. User input and user testing are perfect examples of that kind of late change. Imagine that you’re setting up a major new e-commerce store; your company needs to boost sales but can’t extend the marketing budget. User testing reveals that the new system does improve slightly on your old one, but with a few more improvements – perhaps to increase the user’s trust in your system, or to improve the system for recommending related products – you could gain a few more percentage points on your sales. At that point, you need a software development process that can react and incorporate those new insights into the site development.

Agile development puts an emphasis on delivery of working prototypes early in the development cycle, giving customers and users a much better idea of what will be delivered at the end. And because these prototypes are delivered early, it’s much easier to incorporate feedback into the finished product. Having worked in software development for some time, I’ve seen plenty of frustration from clients who want to make changes at the last minute, causing even more frustration amongst the software developers who see weeks or months of work being re-written to accomodate them. Projects go over time and over budget when that happens, and Agile development excels at preventing these problems.

It is by combining the two approaches outlined above that we deliver our projects at PRWD. As a developer I’ve found the Agile mindset to fit much better with the problems that I have to solve and with the need to react to a variety of inputs, from clients and system users alike. Being that responsive to user requirements does require a change in mindset from that of a traditional software developer: it’s no longer safe to assume that I always know best about how something should work, and I have to be more flexible to cope with the requirements of the users. But this is all worthwhile as it reduces the pressure associated with delivering a piece of software – if the users and the clients have been involved in the development, you know that they will be happy with the end result.

This great article has prompted me to look at producing an article on our blog around the same subject, providing some insight into our methods of optimising our clients lead generation websites and pages.

Until this article is produced head over to Bryan’s article which I’m sure you will find provides some valuable insights and tips for your business.

Firstly, turn down the panic button; online spending is on the increase (sales in the first quarter of 2008 are up 50% on last year, NMA 15.05.08), so there’s currently a good opportunity to earn your keep, but you’re going to have to work extra hard for your share, as competition online is hotting up.

Here’s my 3 primers on how to do it

1. . Position your business for long term growth and opportunity. Many businesses go the wrong way by not taking advantage of opportunities they would have otherwise snapped up. Don’t forget things can only get better! You’ll need to be ready to swoop in and pick up all the business your competitors won’t be prepared for after this period by pushing forward with your business growth instead of shying away.
2. Invest but wisely. There’s no point simply having an e-commerce website unless it is efficiently converting your traffic. Ensuring the usability of the site is at its best so that consumers have a problem-free shopping journey is a must. But spending your pennies to make improvements can seem like a hard call in times like these. That why here at PRWD we drive cost savings by using the open source web frameworks built with PHP. Investing in web improvements using such technology will save you money whilst providing substantial return on your investment, if a User Centered Design approach is used.
3. Take advantage of marketing you business online for free by using social networking and blogs to stimulate interest in the online world. According to research by Hitwise (Hopkins, 2006), social networking site MySpace is responsible for more Traffic flow into the HMV.co.uk music portal than both the Yahoo and MSN UK search engines.

The extent to which this generation has grown alongside the internet means that not only are the consumers of today extremely internet savy but have very high expectations.

Many sites do not live up to consumers expectations

OK we’ve moved on a long way from the first generation of flat websites, but still some fundamental elements are being ignored by some of the major e-tailers:

• Getting the brand story from in-store experience to an online experience
• Technical issues such as slow loading page speeds or faulty links causing major dis-satisfaction and reduced conversation rates
• Poor navigation and lengthy purchasing process; consumers today will simply not tolerate this and leave your site and shop elsewhere
• Poor product images – there’s really no excuse
• Lack of innovation with available programs, applications and online communities such as 360 views, virtual tours, YouTube, Video Jug and social networking sites.

Finally and worst of all, I can still find some retailers who for reasons unknown to me have a complete lack of online presence. This can severely damage a brand and customer satisfaction.

With the fight for the consumers pound harder then ever and online spending on the increase (sales in the first quarter of 2008 are up 50% on last year, NMA 15.05.08) what better time than to address the usability and design of your website? Check out our website and range of usability services for more info

The PRWD website is getting a much needed makeover and will, over the next couple of months, grow in terms of rich media content to include interactive pages, video and bags of personality. It will not only act as a great platform for selling the business and what we do here at PRWD but will also act as a great source of information on current industry topics and research. The site will be a ‘place to stop by’ on the web with its regularly updated content, keeping both our customers and blog subscribers up-to-date and informed.

Paul Rouke, founder of PRWD, admitted that the revamp was long overdue but as the business quickly rocketed into its new market place with some very big clients on the books, the website took the back burner.

“With Katie coming into the business as our marketing and brand development executive, she has wasted no time in highlighting the areas (and there are certainly quite a few of them!) where the business needs to significantly improve from a branding and marketing perspective. Not only does the business site need some much needed personality, it was completely lacking in informing visitors of our expertise and credibility in the Usability and Web Development industry, as well as not shouting about some of our exceptional blue chip client wins.

With our new blog design and now the now business homepage both live, visitors can at last begin to fully appreciate the work we are doing and the expert people that are behind PRWD.”

Light at the end of the tunnel

Having taken on several new members of staff over the past couple of months we are now able to begin addressing the website so that it does PRWD justice.

I think you’ll all agree the new homepage for the website make a huge difference. We hope you enjoy it.

Our new homepage…

And what we used to have…

The website’s preview will be launched later today, with the major rebuild underway and likely to go live later this summer. We’ll keep you posted.