Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

I have recently provided comments on one of Bryan Eisenberg’s articles over at Grokdotcom focused on optimising your lead generation pages.

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.

Thinking back I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have an email account. Nor can I remember a time when I couldn’t get in touch with people from all over the world in a matter of seconds by simply opening up messenger or Facebook. I buy most of my electronic goods, books, and travel online and would never even dream about purchasing a product without reading reviews and checking out a few sites to gauge the sort of price I should be paying, whether I purchase online or not. Not mentioning the 30 plus sites I will check daily from news RSS feeds to bus timetables, cinema times, or downloading vouchers for the restaurant I’m going to that evening.

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

A recent post on E-consultancy entitled Five reasons why you should embrace Usability provides the following reasons as to why businesses, especially true for businesses operating e-commerce websites, can’t ignore the challenge of making their online experience usable. Instead businesses should embrace usability:

1. You seriously can’t afford not to

Repeat: you cannot afford to ignore the user experience. Especially if you sell online. Or if you can afford to then you aren’t optimising your business performance. It’s that simple.

2. User experience can be more important than brand and price

It can be argued that the user experience is more important than both brand and price. What use is a brand like Gap when there is no on-site search tool on Gap.com?

What use is discounting prices when your checkout process is poor and haemorrhages prospective buyers? Conversely, a startup with no known brand and average prices can get on the map by being more user-friendly than established competition.

3. Gain the competitive advantage

There is a bigger picture here: a higher than average conversion rate will ultimately help you to outbid competitors on Google Adwords.

Usability studies can help you convert as many prospective customers as possible. Again, with Google Adwords in mind, if you are paying to attract these prospects then it becomes even more important to realize a return on your (paid search) investment.

Likewise, if your site converts well, then affiliates will like sending traffic to your site as the earnings per click (EPC) they get from you (how much money they make on average per referral they send you) will be better than your competition.

4. Focus on web standards

Usability studies will test your website for errors, as well as problem zones. Error-free code is important for various reasons, not least your Google rankings.

5. You are already spending on design

Websites should be constantly tweaked for optimum business results, but even if you only update your site every couple of years you will still spend a lot of money, so make sure you spend it wisely.

Invest 5%-20% of your design budget on usability to be sure that your new design is in line with what your users want. Usability first, changes second.

My thoughts on why businesses can’t ignore usability

Alongside the comments above, introducing usability into an existing website, by way of either small, subtle changes, for instance to the visibility of key site tools, or by carrying out a complete expert usability site critique, through a complete cycle of card sorting, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, user testing, eye tracking and carrying out focus groups (a non definitive list) businesses can achieve clear increases in visitor conversion rates, shopping basket sizes, registrations, applications, newsletter sign-ups and other specific goals which the business is targeting for their website.

Visitors experiencing good usability on an e-commerce site will:

1. be more likely to complete a shopping process
2. be more willing to browse additional ranges of products that wouldn’t normally be looking for
3. enjoy their experience and be more inclined to revisit the site in future
4. have confidence in the ways in which they can find the products they are looking for (ie. by an intuitive navigation system, by a clear and helpful search facility, by special seasonal specific promotions, plus viewing related products whilst that are browsing the ranges)
5. feel in control of their browsing at all times, avoiding the feeling of being lost and having to go back to the homepage and start again
6. recommend the site to friends and colleagues who share similar shopping styles, therefore providing the business with free publicity
7. be more receptive to marketing communications from the business

And my final benefit (for this post) to a businesses providing good online usability…

Customers will visit and shop from the site again and again, as it is somewhere where they feel comfortable and in control, which helps develop trust in the brand. Visitors are always more likely to remember a site they have enjoyed using than one which confused or frustrated them.

Users clicking on a link from a search engine results page expect that the explanation of the site as shown by the search engine matches the content of the site they land on. Therefore to provide an optimal initial user experience the page title and description should accurately describe the contents of that page.

Page Titles & Descriptions for Search Engine Optimisation

As detailed in this wonderfully detailed and informed report on search engine ranking factors, by www.seomoz.org, page titles in particular play a highly significant part in ranking a site on the like of Google.

Search Engine Optimisation for PRWD Client’s

The clients that my business, PRWD, work for all benefit from the knowledge and expertise of these kinds of ranking factors which help to give the site significant and high exposure on the major search engines for non brand search queries. 2 case studies of SEO, which include the factors highlighted in the report, are for Blue Rhapsody SEO and Swift Dental SEO.

A very noteworthy post has just been added to the E-consultancy blog, on feature filtering for E-commerce sites. This article explains the key reasons why e-commerce websites aiming to empower the user with the tools to allow them to view specific sections of your product range will provide much greater customer satisfaction than one which provides limited browsing paths through your range of products.

Virgin Wines Case Study

I have recently completed a project to provide a very top level user experience concept for Virgin Wines, which provides a wide range of filtering options for the user as they determine which types/colours/price ranges/customer rating they would like to apply to the currently displayed bottles of wine.

Visually there a variety of ways of displaying the tools and filtering options for a user, but the over-riding factor to providing feature filtering is to empower the user with the knowledge that they are controlling the display of products, rather than having the site dictate to them how they will browse through the ranges.

Feature filtering is an area of user experience that I intend discussing and writing about on this blog in much more detail, and with my 6 years of online design experience at Littlewoods Shop Direct Group there are lots of examples which can be used for large multi-million E-commerce sites which should be of interest.