Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

Econsultancy have published a new usability article of mine entitled:
Pureplay and high street fashion retailers – who values usability more?

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.

I’ve just uploaded my presentation slides from yesterdays enjoyable How Do conference in Liverpool, titled ‘Speeding Up In A Slowdown’. For information you can see details of the conference and speaker line-up, including a keynote from Google.

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

Using PRWD‘s benchmarking application I have recently published an article on Econsultancy, looking at both Amazon and The Book Depository. The title of the article is Amazon relying on brand credibility instead of good usability.

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…

I was recently contacted by the publishers of The Royal Mail’s quarterly SMART magazine to see whether I would be willing to take part in a ‘Ask The Expert’ business clinic in their next edition. They had come to know of me having looked on the Econsultancy expert trainer team page that I feature on, with me being one of their external e-commerce trainers.

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.

I’m highly honoured to have recently been asked by How Do to speak alongside Google and PricewaterhouseCoopers at a conference entitled Speeding up in the Slowdown on Thursday 4th June 2009 in Liverpool.

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.