At the start of 2009 the official PRWD blog launched, which obviously didn’t impact too much on me writing content here during that year, but it most certainly has during 2010.

Thankfully I’m able to confirm that I have been keeping busy, and having taken a look at the PRWD blog there are a wide number of projects, news stories, tips and best practice articles that its worth sharing on here.

Case Study – Hyde Group Intranet Evaluation and User Testing

During January 2010 we caried out an extensive evaluation of the intranet for the Hyde Group, who are one of the largest housing associations in the UK, owning or managing over 43,000 homes to over 120,000 customers.
The project involved extensive user testing with staff, an expert usability evaluation and many days of usability consultancy.

Article – 5 Tips When Conducting User Research

Whether its referred to as user research, customer research, field studies, qualititive research or one of the other terms used, finding out the wants and needs of people who use websites, intranets and software is a crucial part of designing usable solutions which deliver return-on-investment.
I wrote this tips article to share some of my experiences and methods when I look to maximise the benefits of conducting user research.

News – Usability Evaluation and Benchmarking App

In April 2010 we provided a screenshot to our usability evaluation and benchmarking app, which I use as part of my e-commerce usability and best practice training course.

Case Study – Isabella Oliver Advanced Google Analytics Training

In early 2010 we provided in-house Google Analytics training for fashion retailer Isabella Oliver, and I was delighted as usual with the feedback the delegates provided after the training.

Case Study – E-commerce User Testing with Isabella Oliver

In February 2010 we carried out user testing down in London for fashion retailer Isabella Oliver. This was a great user testing project and we thoroughly enjoyed working with the Isabella Oliver team.

News – I Featured In Drapers Magazine

In May 2010 I was delighted to be asked to feature in Drapers magazine, providing some tips and advice on e-commerce conversion optimisation.

Client Project – Speedo E-commerce Usability Evaluation and Interaction Designs

During the Summer I was absolutely delighted to be working with Speedo again, following a project at the start of the year. I was asked by Speedo to provided a comprehensive usability (heuristic) evaluation of the e-commerce shopping experience, followed by me designing new interaction designs for key pages within their shopping process – namely product page, shopping basket and checkout process.
Following this work we published a press release about my work which included a fantastic testimonial from the Head of E-commerce at Speedo.

Book Review – REWORK by 37Signals

Yeh yeh I know this isn’t what I usually write about, but having been recommended the book by Dan Donald, once I’d read through it for the first time I genuinely felt compelled to write a review. And yes its a fantastic read if you work for yourself or manage a small team!

News – Lewis Marshall Joined PRWD

In July 2010 I was absolutely delighted that Lewis Marshall joined me at PRWD. As it turned out Lewis was with me until the end of 2010 when PRWD finished providing technical capabilities to design and build user-centered design solutions. All that I have to say about Lewis is that he is a remarkable person who has an extremely special career ahead of him, and I’m just happy that I have benefitted from working with him over the 7 months he was in my business. We are also very good friends and will continue to see each other going forward.
Oh and if you know someone that is looking for an exceptional Ruby on Rails developer, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Lewis…

Best Practice Advice – Don’t Force New Customers To Register To Checkout

As one of the guest expert commentators for Econsultancy, I published an article on their blog discussing handling 1st time customers within checkout, in particular when retailers force 1st time shoppers to register in order to checkout.

One of our clients Speedo handle this very well, by only asking 1st time shoppers if they would like to create a password and set-up their account on the order confirmation page.

The full article on Econsultancy entitled Reduce Checkout Abandonments and Increase Registrations has proved pretty popular, with a big number of comments and lots of advice and recommendations put forward, by both myself and some of the people commenting.

What Does PRWD Stand For?

We get asked many times what does PRWD stand for, and I wrote an article on the PRWD blog explaining just this. PRWD is An Acronym for ‘PRoductivity Without Difficulty’ – read more about the rationale behind this, as well as lots of case studies demonstrating what we’re about.

News – User Testing Lab Launch at MMU in Manchester

Having being the first company to use Manchester Metropolitan Universities User Testing Lab facility for commercial purposes in 2010 (we carried out a user testing project for a well known highstreet retailer of homewares) we were absolutely delighted to be asked to help launch the lab.

News – Usability Testing in Manchester

Following on from the user testing lab launch I wrote an article explaining more about PRWD’s user testing services. It also included links to a couple of case studies, e-commerce user testing for Isabella Oliver and intranet user testing for the Hyde Group.

Press Release – PRWD Help Launch Manchester’s First User Testing Lab

Following on from the lab launch we were delighted to send out a press release explaining about the facilities and our partnership with MMU. MMU are one of the organisations that are featured on our website, which also includes Econsultancy, Smart Insights, Manchester Digital and the Usability Professionals Association.

Best Practice Advice – Increasing New Customer Conversion Rates (for Smart Insights)

This year I was very privileged to have been invited by Dr Dave Chaffey to start providing expert commentary pieces for his online portal Smart Insights. My first post was looking at the variety of ways retailers handle new customer checkout, as well as providing a range of best practice tips to retailers looking at reducing checkout process abandonments.

Merry Christmas from Me and PRWD!

And finally, our last monthly newsletter of the year was dedicated to wishing our subscribers a merry Christmas, although I decided to mix up the formula a bit by not including a single Christmas image. Instead I opted to include a variety of images which demonstrate some of the key client challenges we tackle as well as images which I use in usability and conversion optimisation event presentations.

Finally may I wish anyone that has managed to read through all this post a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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%.

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

E-commerce Best Practice for Maximising Conversion Rates

E-consultancy

E-consultancy.com provides information, training and events on best practice online marketing and e-commerce. They are the UK’s leading online publisher of best practice internet marketing reports, research and how-to guides. They also publish buyer’s guides and have the largest directory of UK e-marketing suppliers.

Founded in 1999, they now have over 42,500 registered users and around 150,000 unique site users per month. Their weekly newsletter is sent to 20,000+ e-marketing professionals.

E-consultancy also provides a range of public and in-house training programmes, which is where I will be involved in. Take a look at the training area at E-consultancy for more detailed information.

Course Description

Usability for e-commerce sites is one of the largest contributors to customer conversion rates.

By applying best practice usability principles throughout the customer journey site owners can increase the amount of visitors who convert from browsing to shopping. In turn, increasing in customer conversions leads to increased returning visitors and average lifetime value, which subsequently establishes greater brand credibility.

Focusing on 3 key stages of the buying journey, Product Page, Shopping Basket and Checkout Process, this interactive workshop will expose some of the most important best practice techniques which retailers can adopt in order to maximise their conversion rates.

Further Course Information and Booking

Full details and course content hasn’t yet being finalised, but what I can say is that if you are in some way involved with or responsible for an e-commerce website then the course content will provide a variety of key best practice techniques which you can adopt in order to maximise your conversion rates.

Further Usability Training Courses

Aside from this specific training course I will also be delivering other courses on the following topics:

• Advanced Navigation and Findability for Blue Chip E-commerce
• Adopting User Centered Design Principles for E-commerce
• Achieving Lean Manufacturing through User Centered Design

If you would like any further information on these training courses then please give me a call in the office on 0161 918 6729.