Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

Following on from my initial post introducing PRWD’s new E-commerce Platform, my first in-depth look at the intelligence and flexibility which were fundamental aspects of the launch e-commerce site will focus on:

User Centered Navigation and Findability

No two web users will exhibit exactly the same browsing behaviour when navigating an e-commerce site, unless they are forced to by only having limited ways in which to search for products (such as categories & subcategories, a search facility and perhaps some use of cross selling during a shopping journey).

Although the actual number of products in the Contact Packaging store isn’t substantial (around 70 for launch, but with around 400 SKU’s), in order to provide user centered navigation and assist in a visitors findability we have provided a wide range of ways in which a visitor can browse for and locate products which match their wants and needs.

Best Practice Navigation and Findability Methods available include:

• Standard categories
• Dynamic categories
• Suggestive search
• Tag clouds
• Related products
• Cross sell products
• Shop by situation
• Best sellers
• Sales products
• Breadcrumb
• Products with related tags

Are we heading towards the longest article known to the blogosphere!?

It is at this point I begin wondering how long this article could end up, if, as I originally intended to, I now begin talking in detail about each of the findability methods listed above. Not to mention me wondering whether anyone will have the stamina (and time) to read and digest the information!

In order to keep this article to a more digestible length and focus on some of the more intelligent aspects of the stores navigation, I will assume that methods such as standard categories, related products, cross sell products, best sellers and sale products are fairly familiar with most people, as these form the primary and secondary ways to navigate most e-commerce websites.

Therefore I will focus my next few articles on:

1. tag clouds using the PRWD tagging engine
2. dynamic suggestive search using PRWD HybridSearch
3. dynamic categories/shop by situation
4. multi-faceted navigation

Following this introductory post going live I will shortly follow this up by talking in depth about the PRWD tagging engine.

I am absolutely delighted to announce the 1st phase launch of PRWD‘s bespoke e-commerce platform, UCDcommerce, with our 1st client to use the platform being one of our long term clients, Contact Packaging.

The e-commerce site, selling a complete range of packaging materials and supplies, from masking tape and bubble wrap through to cardboard boxes and stretch wrapping machinery, has been designed by myself and developed by one remarkable technical architect and developer, Sam Clark. You may like to read Sam Clark’s initial thoughts on the e-commerce platform.

At this stage you may be wondering ‘why develop a completely new framework and platform when there are so many existing e-commerce providers out there?‘.

And my answer, as user experience director of PRWD, is this…

Our clients, both existing and potential, demand a scalable, best practice driven, intelligent and user focused e-commerce platform on which PRWD can develop bespoke e-commerce solutions to revolutionise their business online.

To give an example as to the type of e-commerce platform which may have supported this answer, our 1 main consideration was becoming a partner with Elastic Path, who have developed E-commerce Software which is used by the likes of Samsonite and Bond & Bond. BTW having looked at these 2 e-commerce sites I must stress they don’t follow our principles on e-commerce findability and user experience, but they may be worth a look all the same.

Complete control over the evolution of our E-commerce Platform

Rather than the partner route, our commercial decision was to develop a new framework (fortnum) and in-house platform, to ensure we had complete control of how the e-commerce platform would evolve, in key areas such as:

• customer intelligence
• CRM system integrations
• user functionality
• user engagement
• embracing and integrating with new technologies

The launch site is only the very start of what will technically be a continually drive in tackling the areas above, and in user experience is just our 1st interpretation of what will drive online sales for this particular client.

There are currently some known usability flaws which need addressing, of which I’m sure other usability professionals will recognise, but with this e-commerce store being in its launch phase there will be scope and budget to address them going forward.

In time I intend posting articles explaining the user centered design process that was adopted during this 1st development, with features on particular areas of the site including:

• user centered navigation and findability
• user engagement
• learnability
• consumer browsing behaviour targeting
• addressing security concerns
• the best practice driven checkout process

Comments please…!

I welcome comments from any readers of my blog and other usability professionals and technical architects and developers – and most importantly comments from online shoppers!

Its been a while since my last post, due mainly to the intensive project work currently underway with my user experience agency PRWD, as well as an excellent holiday in New York (check out the new header image which captures 1 aspect of the unique Big Apple) for my 30th birthday.

Best Practice Driven E-commerce Platform

At PRWD we are really excited about the e-commerce platform we are currently developing for a client from the ground up, which is based very much on e-commerce best practice and is using considerable amounts of my past experience from Littlewoods Shop Direct.
Some of the key features which are being incorporated into the scalable platform for phase 1 are as follows:

• an information architecture which was derived from user input and card sorting exercises
• a dedicated tag engine which will allow visitors to navigate through the products in a fluid and dynamic way
• a user interface which started from paper prototyping, all the way through to final interaction and visual designs
• a personalisation engine which will provide returning customers with personalised products and offers
• a layer of richer user interactions to enhance the user experience, whilst remaining cross-browser compatible and fully accessible
• a checkout process derived very much from research, awareness and understanding of best practices in ensuring checkout abandonment rates are reduced where possible, and therefore providing the client with greater conversion rates
• intelligent methods of targeting product promotions to specific target customers, which we have established by working very closely with our client in fully understanding their existing and potential client needs

Along with this platform development we are working for one of the largest direct marketing agencies in the UK to deliver their new online marketing platform, which is generating huge enthusiasm between the clients project team and PRWD’s team, which I am heading up along with providing the user experience and managing the user centred design process.

These current projects follow some high-end user experience consultancy based work which I personally have been providing some large design agencies in Manchester, which I intend to provide some relevant posts on in due course.

So coming back to my blog, unfortunately content has been very sparse over the last few months, apart from the well received user experience review of the new House of Fraser e-commerce site, but at least the lack of posts aren’t due to the lack of work being put in on the key areas of usability and information architecture recently!

User Experience Training and Knowledge Sharing for 2008

Looking ahead to 2008, at PRWD we will be starting to provide User Experience and Online Marketing Training, at both our modern Manchester offices and in-house working directly with clients and their employees. We have seen a considerable demand from our clients, in particular blue chip retailers and established design agencies, to up-skill their in-house staff and therefore ensure user centred design processes are adopted on large projects, whether transactional or informational.

This blog will certainly be apart of the marketing strategy for promoting these new services during 2008 and in addition I’ll look forward to continuing with posting articles on all aspects of online user experience.

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.