Testing Testing 1, 2 3

We’ve been busy working with some of our existing clients such as Contact Packaging (selling printed tape) and new clients such as The Translation People (providing document translation services) in optimising their conversion rates through analysis and testing (split and mutli-variate).

Event Speaking

Following on from my successful and rewarding presentation at the recent How Do conference in Liverpool, Rob Knight (PRWD’s lead technical architect) has spoken at an event titled Developing With Adobe AIR, which had a keynote from Adobe. Rob’s presentation was titled Business Systems With Adobe AIR and it featured the work we’ve done with a manufacturing company to deliver a user-centered designed business system for them. We have also developed a micro-site detailing our business systems and e-commerce services for manufacturers.

Case Studies

We’ve also released a couple more case studies of some of the work we have been doing and the results we’ve had, in particular on improving online sales by 400% for one of our clients and a technical case study on using Adobe AIR for business systems.

Twittering

I’ve been twittering over the past few weeks (not consistently I hasten to add!) and along the way picking up quite a few new followers, some of which I would put in the spam category. We have also been updating the PRWD twitter account although you tell its alot younger than my personal twitter account!

Featured Supplier In Econsultancy’s User Experience Buyers Guide 2009

We were delighted to be asked to feature as one of the 26 agencies who specialise in user experience and usability in Econsultancy’s annual guide on this topic. I also spent time providing feedback on a number of questions relating to the industry, and if you download the full version you will see various quotes from myself.

In the article I’ve taken a look at the following high street and pureplay retailers from a usability perspective…

The pureplay fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• ASOS
• Net-a-porter
• My Wardrobe
• The Outnet
• Koodos

The high street fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• Harvey Nichols
• Miss Selfridge
• Topshop
• Next
• New Look

The five questions I posed to each of these retailers are:

1. How seriously are they taking cross-selling and up-selling in order to encourage higher average order values?
2. Do they make standard delivery costs clear before you get into the actual checkout process?
3. Are payment options and cards accepted clear prior to checking out?
4. Have they enclosed their checkout as a way of potentially reducing checkout process abandonments?
5. Do they provide clear customer service contact details during the checkout process?

Take a look at the article and see how these retailers stack up!

If you are a fashion retailer you might also like to read about the Online Fashion 100 event on the 17th June in London, organised by Leon Bailey-Green.

Online Fashion 100, in the words of Leon Bailey-Green, is:

a collection of inspirational, interesting and influential people in the online fashion industry

Just some of the names and brands that are on the list include:

• MIRIAM LAHAGE of Koodos.com
• NATALIE MASSENET of Net-A-Porter and theOutnet.com
• ANDREW CURRAN & SARAH CURRAN of My-Wardrobe.com
• DAN WAGNER of Venda and OSOYOU.com
• NICK ROBERTSON & HASH LADHA of ASOS
• ROB JONES of Harvey Nichols
• DAVID WALMSLEY of John Lewis
• RICHARD BRASHER of Tesco
• NANCY CRUICKSHANK of http://www.videojug.com/ and TMG
• JULIA REYNOLDS of Figleaves.com

Download a pdf of the complete Online Fashion 100 rundown

It’s safe to say that the event should have a real buzz about it and I’m looking forward to meeting up with some of the Online Fashion 100 select plus other movers and shakers in the fashion retail business.

How much focus do the retailers place on a good user experience?

Following my recent usability and benchmarking article on Econsultancy I’ve published another article looking at some of the pureplay and high street fashion retailers when it comes to key areas of the online customer experience and usability best practice.

Pureplay fashion brands that feature include ASOS, my-wardrobe, Net-a-porter, Koodos and The Outnet.

High street fashion brands that feature include Harvey Nichols, Miss Selfridge, Topshop, Next and New Look.

Take a look at the article and feel free to get in touch if you would like more information.

Most recently I provided a full day of in-house training for The Scout Association. What was most interesting with this work was that they where embedding usability at the very start of their new e-commerce and ERP platform development project, rather than putting a focus on usability and customer experience at the latter end of the project, which is often the case.

In the words of E-commerce and ERP Project Manager Mark Selwyn,

In order to deliver the system within budget, my objective was to build “usability” into the design of the new web stores, using industry best practices, rather than have to rework at a later stage as a result of usability testing

E-commerce Areas Covered

The areas that I provide training on for the in-house e-commerce training are as follows:

• Homepage
• Search
• Navigation
• Category page
• Product page
• Persuasion architecture
• Cross-selling and up-selling
• Shopping basket
• Checkout process
• Web forms

Case Study For In-house Training

We have recently published a case study for the training course I delivered for The Scout Association which provides plenty of detail in the following areas:

• Background to The Scout Association
• Objectives for The Scout Association
• What I Delivered
• The Benefits and Impact for The Scout Association
• Testimonials
• Training Course Feedback Ratings

I must say I was delighted to receive the feedback that I received and its great to see how they are progressing with the project since I delivered the training course.

Are You Looking To Up-skill Your Internal Team?

If so then please give me a call and I will be delighted to provide a quote for delivering training and consultancy for you and your business. Typically one day of in-house training costs around £1000 plus expenses, and if a bespoke training course is required then planning time will also be charged. Please note prices exclude VAT @ 15%.

My 35 minute presentation (shown below) focused on 3 key areas that businesses need to consider if they want to make serious improvements to their online performance, and all on working with smaller budgets than what they would have had pre-recession:

• Understanding visitors - using gorilla user testing to actually begin understanding what visitors want and why they don’t complete their objectives
• Measuring performance - its not good enough to just have analytics installed on your site, you need to be looking at goals, funnels and developing advanced segments to truly begin understanding visitor behaviour
• Testing and improving - using split testing to make continual, incremental improvements to conversion rates, click-throughs from key pages and overal website performance

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…

It would involved me providing 200 words of advice to the business Justin Guitar looking for expert advice and guidance on a particular challenge or objective they have with their e-commerce business.

Naturally I was delighted to provide some recommendations (see below) and you can also view the full article as a pdf which includes the companies business challenges, my recommendations, plus feedback from the business owner having seen the advice I had put forward.

Download the full business clinic article from Royal Mail (pdf)

Paul Rouke's advice on Royal Mail's ask the expert clinic

By taking part in this Ask The Expert business clinic I was then asked if I would take part in a range of ‘1 minute mentor sessions’ on video, which provide businesses who go on to the Royal Mail’s SMART portal with expert tips and advice in areas such as marketing, improving conversion rates, improving efficiency, multi-channel retailing and delivery options.

More information and links to the videos will follow soon, although you may well find the videos by taking a look at the SMART portal.

Conference Overview

Coping with and emerging from this recession in a stronger and profitable state are quite simply what most businesses wish to achieve. This major How-Do half day conference in Liverpool has drawn together five outstanding speakers whose collective expertise can help companies achieve just that.

In the current challenging economic climate, companies who not only survive, but actually thrive, are those who can develop and utilise a true competitive edge. If you want to guarantee your business the opportunity to implement ideas that will help make it more productive, more pro-active, more competitive and ultimately more profitable, then this conference is for you.

How-Do has brought together an outstanding panel of speakers for this conference at Liverpool Science Park, all of whom are focused on providing the type of insight and information that can make a real difference to the success of your organisation.

Areas Covered

The speakers including myself will be covering five key areas of your business:

• learning first hand from Google on what’s really working online
• how to develop and win new business
• more effective communication and engagement with business media
• improving the performance of your e-platforms
• reviewing and developing your strategy in a crowded marketplace

The Panel Of Speakers Are

• Andrew Barke (Google)
• Paul Rouke (PRWD)
• Bill Gleeson (Liverpool Daily Post)
• John Leach (Winning Pitch)
• Eva Berg-Winters (PricewaterhouseCoopers)

Booking Information

Delegate tickets are £88 + VAT early booking/charity rate (for bookings before 22nd May or whilst tickets last), £118 + VAT thereafter. Places are limited and you can book online to reserve your place. If you have any queries please contact Cathryn O’Grady on 07918 174176, or by e-mail cath@how-do.co.uk.

Having recently delivered in-house e-commerce training and on the eve of a public training course with Econsultancy, I thought I’d share a fine example of an online retailer following usability and best practice principles to drive improvements to their conversion rates and customer retention.

Enter The Boook Depository. Only a young pureplay brand, launched in 2004 and with a recent redesign in 2009, The Book Depository certainly does alot of things right when it comes to providing an enjoyable, intelligent and usable shopping experience.

A screengrab of The Book Depository website, good usability and best practice

Using our new e-commerce benchmarking application I’m looking forward to comparing how The Book Depository fair to other online book sellers. One thing is for sure though, their approach of always tackling the question “what do our customers want” has led their e-commerce experience to be a fine example of good usability and following best practice.

Which online retailers would you put forward as more examples of a great user experience?

Top Tips for Increasing Your E-commerce Conversion Rates

Below are a few top tips for improving both the usability of your e-commerce site and small changes which can help improve conversion rates. Further resources are provided at the end of the article.

Search and Navigation

• Make search an integrated and intelligent piece of functionality - if it isn’t, visitors will quickly dismiss the tool as something that will help them find what they want, and in turn could consider jumping over to a competitor site.
• Provide predictive/suggestive search results - benefits include reducing the number of ‘no results found’ pages, promoting saving information which will appeal to shoppers, plus exposing some of your product catalogue which the shopper may not have realised existed
• Allow visitors to filter your product range by relevant attributes (price bracket, specification, colour, size etc) - the easier you can make it for shoppers to find products which match their requirements the more likely they will be to purchase from you

Shopping Basket

• Don’t hide your delivery costs until the checkout process - even if a shopper can specify a more expensive delivery option in checkout, at least ensure your standard delivery charges are provided
• Make it clear what payment options are available, before the checkout process - especially important if you don’t accept debit card payments like www.booking.com
• Promote free delivery options clearly, if you provide them - this can play a significant part in persuading visitors to both make a purchase, but also increase their order value if it means triggering a free delivery level

Checkout Process

• Rule number 1 - enclose your checkout process. There are a range of key reasons why this is so important for retailers, one of which is ensuring you are focusing the shoppers mind on the 1 key action you want them to do - place their order with you. More advice on why you should enclose your checkout process can be seen in the resources at the end of this article
• Make it absolutely clear the levels of security you provide - concerns over credit card fraud are here for the long term, and you should make sure your visitors have every confidence in you to keep their details secure
• Pay close attention to how to present forms - by adopting form field best practice you make the checkout process more streamlined and you keep the shopper in a positive buying mood. Straight to the point error messages that point the finger at the visitor is one way of putting a small usability barrier in front of them

All Areas, Especially Shopping Basket and Checkout

• Carry out split testing and multi-variate testing - alongside best practice principles, this is one of the primary ways of affectively measuring the differences in click-throughs and engagement when adopting different designs, buttons, colours and messages

Looking for More Best Practice Tips and Advice?

If you are interested in gaining a much greater understanding of how small but integral changes can be made to e-commerce sites to help improve conversion rates, then the upcoming training course on the 23rd April in London is for you.

There is also funding currently available which could cover the cost of the course.

Below are further details on what will be covered in the days training course:

Product page best practice

• how to introduce best practice into your customer experience
• how some of the biggest e-tailers are following or defining best practice
• how to cross-sell and up-sell affectively
• how to introduce persuasion architecture

Shopping basket best practice

• pros and cons of the most popular implementations
• understand the impact you can have on consumer confidence
• how to channel customers into the checkout process

Checkout process best practice

• the rational behind enclosing the process to reduce checkout abandonments
• a framework for delivering a best practice checkout process
• how to reduced usability barriers to completing forms during your checkout process

Advanced user experience techniques

• how to engage and delight customers with memorable interactions

Useful resources

• best practice tips for search implementation
• benefits of suggestive/predictive search (scroll down the page)
• benefits and best practice for multi-faceted navigation, for both users and retailers
• the importance of enclosing your checkout process
• form field best practice, vital for checkout processes