Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

To all online marketing managers, project managers, site owners, designers and developers (of commercial websites) - if you haven’t yet experienced user testing of your (or your clients) site 1st hand, then (budget permitting) I would strongly recommend getting your feet wet.

Instant benefits user testing can provide you and your business (or your clients business)

1. Provides immediate quick wins - you can then action and subsequently enhance the user experience and user task completion rates, in turn increasing site conversions and ultimately your ROI
2. Establish why checkout conversion rates are low and drop-out (abandonment) rates for a particular stage in the checkour process are high - again for E-commerce sites, a serious issue effecting the majority of sites large and small is poor (or poorer than what can be achieved) conversion rates of customers who have begun a checkout process. User testing this key shopping journey can identify where users experience barriers to progression and any areas of frustration or security concerns.
3. The significant Search Engine Marketing company budget isn’t being wasted - rather than continuing to throw money on Google Adwords marketing and similar, driving more potential new customers to your (un-tested/poor conversions) website, budget is spent optimising the user experience of the site which will provide much greater increases in return on investment
4. Help identify key issues in information architecture - knowing that users struggle to find a key area/tool within the website can be invaluable, providing the necessary proof that key changes need to be made
5. Raises issues not even considered internally - perhaps an area that is considered optimal may in fact have room for improvement
6. Shopping behaviours can be identified and the website tailored to maximise conversion opportunities - for e-commerce sites, providing there are enough participants, user testing will provide insight into different shopping behaviours (hunters, followers, impulse buyers) which in turn can help a business identify how critical information and calls to actions should be positioned within a page hierarchy as users progress through a shopping journey
7. Quashes any in-house politics - real users provide the insights into what is and isn’t working on your site
8. Creative marketing messages and promotions ignored - the expensive, slick piece of on-site marketing is actually overlooked as users exhibit banner blindness, instead they go looking for actual site content and not forms of advertising or promotions

User testing, when conducted professionally, can provide an overwhelming insight into how real users actually interact (or attempt to interact) with your site.

As I have experienced on both transactional and non-transactional websites, from SME’s to blue chip companies such as Littlewoods Shop Direct, the return on investment by carrying out user testing can be outstanding to a businesses online operation

Understandably work is required on identifying your existing and potential target audiences, and ensuring the right users are recruited to carry out the user testing, but with the right user testing facilitator (a service I personally provide through my user experience agency) and the right structure of test scenarios, gaining the insight available through observing a user using your website can both shock and excite website owners, as they realise both the current failings of their site (whether in user experience, information architecture or technical errors) and begin to understand that by making sometimes subtle changes to their site will significantly increase user task completion rates.

What if you have no budget for user testing?

• For businesses and clients without sufficient budget - improvise! Use friends and family who use the internet to a level which fits with one of your customer segments
• Task these people with the same site objectives inline with your commercial objectives
• Observe them as they navigate the site, successfully or un-successfully, and you will begin to realise the potential of user testing

With reference to the title of this post, in addition to observing user testing, a second factor comes in to play - think out loud methodology.

What is think out loud methodology?

The user is encouraged to talk about their experiences when carrying out task and scenario based exercises, so when they may have paused their mouse movement whilst contemplating where to look/what to click on, the user testing facilitator encourages (but only subtly) the user to talk about what is going through their minds at this key stage - remember the more cognitive effort a user requires to complete their tasks can enhance their frustrations or limit their patience in carrying out the task

I have spoke to other usability professionals, some of who don’t like to rely on what the user says, and although this can be true dependant on a variety of factors such as a facilitator who wrongly provides prompts for the user, or when a users actual site interactions conflict significantly with what they are saying, for any user testing that I have facilitated or being involved in, the user is always encouraged to ‘think out loud’.

How to maximise the potential of think out loud user testing

I would like to point you to an excellent and comprehensive article over at UX Matters entitled When Observing Users Is Not Enough: 10 Guidelines for Getting More Out of Users’ Verbal Comments. A quick summary of the 10 points that Isabelle Peyrichoux talk about in depth are:

1. Be aware of your own judgments and projections
2. Be genuine and transparent
3. Adapt to each user. Do not ask users to adapt to you
4. Be conscious of the way users are interacting with you
5. Get users to speak about their own experiences
6. Notice when users are censoring their own comments
7. Get users to speak in terms of problems, not solutions
8. Ask “Why?” and dig deeper
9. Make objective and precise observations
10. Allow users to be spontaneous and follow their flow

Although this great article will be of more use to user experience professionals and people involved in user testing on any level, it should provide an incite as to how user testing and the think out load methodology can be combined using basic (but often un-used) human relationship qualities to provide optimum user testing data and results.

Eye tracking - another level of user testing and customer insight

Coupled with the user testing and think-out loud principles, taking the testing another step further by introducing eye tracking can provide an even greater insight into exactly how users are interpreting a website and trying to find their way around to achieve the tasks/goals they have been assigned.

It would be diluting my points on user testing with the ‘think out loud’ methodology to go more in depth with the benefits of eye-tracking on this post, although it is certainly an area I will talk about more on a later post, especially as my user experience agency has now introduced this service to our clients.

Using Web Analytics To Further Identify Site Conversion Improvements

Although I’m a big fan of using web analytic data to uncover a vast range of improvement possibilities with site content and conversions, for this post the most useful think I can do is direct you to the following pages on the excellent blog of Avinash Kaushik dealing with all things analytics:

• Experimentation and Testing: A Primer
• Excellent Analytics Tip#5: Conversion Rate Basics & Best Practices
• Excellent Analytics Tip #8: Measure the Real Conversion Rate & “Opportunity Pie”

I hope you’ve found this article useful, and any feedback (and diggs) are greatly appreciated!

Around April 2007 I was delighted to be asked to contribute to a Web Design Best Practice Guide which Dave Chaffey and E-consultancy were producing.

The guide was to provide a regularly updated, single point of reference covering best practice approaches for all the topics that anyone involved with website design needs to do an effective job.

Due to the sheer scope of the guide, I was asked to provide contributions, advice and case study examples on specific topics within the guide suited to my experiences and expertise.

The areas I contributed to were as follows:

• Section 3. User-centred web design process
• Section 4. Web usability
• Section 6. Information architecture
• Section 7. Visual Design

The finalised guide is more than 350 pages in length, which is considered one of the most comprehensive reports of its kind available.

You can view full details of the content of the guide within the best practice guides area at E-consultancy, entitled Web Design Best Practice Guide.

I strongly recommend you at least downloading the sample best pracice guide which may well encourage to purchase and download the full guide.

Finally I must add a thankyou to Dave Chaffey (whom I’ve recently taken part in a Q and A session on Findability for online design and marketing, particularly for e-commerce sites) and Chris Lake, editor at E-consultancy, for in the 1st instance requesting my input to this huge project but also for adding in a special mention within the contributors section at the back of the full guide!

I’d love to get your feedback on the best practice guide if you choose to download it, or share any other comments on this posting.

I was delighted to have recently been interviewed by Dave Chaffey, BSc, PhD, FCIM, MIDM, for my thoughts, recommendations and guidance on the key aspect of findability in online marketing. Dave is an author, consultant and trainer specialising in E-commerce and E-marketing education and guidance. Huge online resources, reports, books and interviews can be found over at Dave’s highly popular website.

The 5 questions that Dave asked me were:

1. What do you see as findability? Why is findability relevant to marketers?
2. How do you tackle findability in your usability projects?
3. What would you say are the biggest findability errors that e-retail sites typically have from a marketing perspective?
4. I know you’re a big advocate of card-sorting. Typically this is part of a heavyweight usability project. Is there any place for it in improve findability of an existing site which is not due a major upgrade.
5. When working at Littlewoods Shop Direct Group there must have been a tension between print-based design techniques for the catalogues and web-based design techniques. Can web designers learn from the catalogue merchandising techniques. Any tips and tricks?

Take a look at the full Q and A session, which from my commercial experience at Littlewoods Shop Direct is geared towards large multi-channel retailers.

Forms - such an integral part of any website wishing to gather visitor data to allow for transactions to be carried out, logging in to account areas, website personalisation, registrations, competition entries, the list goes on.

Although in principle forms are simply different drop downs, text entry boxes and preference setting checkboxes and radio buttons, the visual and coding execution of forms can be the difference between an abandoned shopping journey and a new customer transaction, registration or application.

Checkout process forms

Crucial to an e-commerce websites success, these forms in general request personal information, delivery information and finally payment information.

Best practise advice for checkout process forms

• ensure a visitor is provided highly visible and clear sign-posting as to a) how many steps are in the process flow b) which stage of the process they are in c) which stages have they have completed - view a case study of how I helped improve the checkout conversion at Littlewoods Shop Direct Group, which incorporates the majority of these best practise points
• ensure it is clear to a visitor which fields are required and which are optional
• only request personal information which is required for them to complete the process (ask for more general personal information such as shopping habits and general interests in registration forms and newsletter sign-ups)
• provide context sensitive advice and information to assure wary users who may be unsure as to why they need to supply a specific piece of information, or a good example is visitors unsure what the ‘CSV’ number on the back of their credit or debit card is
• provide relevant security and payment certificates to alleviate safety concerns, especially true for a business without a solid and well know reputation
• allow a user to go back to a previous stage in the process without losing the information they have already keyed in (if this happens visitor frustration will occur, which can quickly be followed by a complete abandonment of the checkout process)
• on submission of form information, where a user has incorrectly entered data or not completed a required, provide friendly, inline messages at the point of the form where the error has occurred, along with an overview at the top of the form as to what fields require attention
• ensure it is clear as to what will be the next occurrence once this submit a form ie. which stage they are moving, whether payment details will be processed by a secure server etc
• prior to finally submitting an order, provide a summary of all the data the user has entered, allowing them (but not encouraging) to edit data if it is incorrect
• once an order has been placed and approved, provide the user with a printer-friendly, clear and user friendly summary of their order details (removing the digits from their credit or debit card of course!)
• errors pages - test, test and further test form processing prior to going live, as a page error (not to be confused with an error message displayed due to an empty required field for instance) displayed to a user is 1 significant way to make the alarm bells for user trust and confidence ring very loudly

I’m sure there will be more comprehensive best practise guides available for checkout process forms, but I hope this provides some tangible and clear guides as to the key areas of this process which I have experienced as having the most impact on conversion and drop-out rates.

Google Checkout is gathering momentum

Leveradging its global brand recognition and trust, Google now offers a new checkout solution, surprisingly titled Google Checkout. For a shopper, once they have provided their personal, delivery and payment details into their secure system once, as they visit E-commerce sites offering Google Checkout the visitor doesn’t have to re-enter all their details. For a seller, simply using a checkout system by such a trusted brand will not only streamline their checkout process for their customers, but the whole online trust issue amongst consumers will be negated, because it is Google.

I will be following the uptake by both consumer and businesses of this new checkout, as I don’t doubt for one second that it will prove to be another highly successful revenue stream for Google.

Form field hints for developers

For developers out there keen to provide inline and context sensitive form field hints, take a look at this interesting article on www.askthecssguy.com entitled form field hints with css and html

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.