Converting visitors to customers – usability has been key for years.
Tuesday 30 August 2011 - Filed under Usability News
Internet based companies have seen massive growth in recent years. As more and more prospective customers chose to use electronic means as a way to buy the goods and services they want, it’s gone from being an alternative way for companies to reach their target audience to the main method and in most cases the preferred method.
Between the birth of e-commerce around 1998 and up until 2004 many usability studies were conducted into the motives and experiences of people who chose or did not choose to shop on the web. Most of us were there to witness the web around this time and there’s a good chance that some of you reading this could have been one those e-commerce skeptics, who for whatever reason said you would never give up your credit card details to the internet.
Why Though? It doesn’t seem stupid now in 2011, far from it. We live with an internet that has credit card fraud and identity theft well publicised everywhere. Go back 10 years though and concerns in this respect don’t seem as rational. There’s the key, we didn’t really like the look of the internet. Yes we all admired the technology and how it was expanding our horizons but let’s face most of the websites out there didn’t give us much confidence with the respect of usability and trust, this included the still few in number e-commerce sites which wanted you to punch in your credit card number.
Most companies and organisations were still to wake up to the fact that user retention was going to key to their success and that of e-commerce in the future. The Human computer interaction question was quickly put to the top of the agenda.
One of the first study’s to confirm how many customers were ‘slipping through the net’ was Lais, 2002. This study confirmed that potential sales totalling billions of dollars were being passed up. It went on to report that the majority of the e-commerce sites around in 2002 were letting on average 70% of their potential online sales slip away. Even the best players were letting 50% walk by. The conclusion was absolute; poor website usability.
The potential success to be had was clear. Organisations small and large could transcend their traditional barriers to reach prospects anywhere and increase their client base, but to sum up the complicated issues surrounding what the company’s presence ‘should be like’, something comprehensive was needed and to see the problems from a user perspective it was more often than not outside that organisations managerial expertise.
The problem of web usability in converting those e-commerce visitors to customers wasn’t going away. Moe & Fader 04 confirmed that though web users were now using the internet to research products, compare prices and so on, actual online purchases were still relatively small and disproportionate.
Many usability experts and academics started to speculate about what the usability issues stopping those sales actually were. Some claimed it was due to a lack of acceptance for many people as a lifestyle choice. Some claimed it was a range a problems throughout a company’s web interface, ranging from product perception, bad web customer service all the way for it being perceived as just ‘too big’ a risk. Whilst other studies said to understand online retail consumer behaviour, models of these internet consumers needed to be created.
This was the point where usability testing became the best method to understand website use and the purchasing behaviour that developed online. Effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction were the basis for this test.
Usability testing was to form a crucial element of the bigger ‘human computer interface’ picture and would prove to be crucial in an organisations ability to design and engineer the most user-friendly and sales-friendly products possible. Since it’s inception though User testing metrics have been debated, argued and scrutinised for the better it has to be said. Still there’s been many differences in opinion over the years regarding what makes a good usability test, enough to fill many books and web pages, but when usability experts look for clarity they often look at one of the earliest studies conducted by Nielsen in 2000. He states that usability engineering is essential to a commercial websites success and that ultimately the goal of any usability test on an e-commerce site is to measure the ‘stickiness’.
Usability is probably the most important factor in the successful e-commerce web presence, which has been recognised in much research as being an invaluable way of Testing Users and improving your service to ultimately deliver sales . It continues to form part of a bigger solution. Overall it seems to be at the centre of the Human Computer Interaction question, running well alongside IS Information Systems research as well as conventional market research.
2011-08-30 » Sam
