Usability In Ecommerce

The #EcomChat session on “Usability In Ecommerce” included lots of advice & thoughts from ecommerce, usability, and conversion practitioners. Below are a few of the excellent comments from the one hour session. As ever, there were 3 rough outline questions to start the conversation:

1. What are the big challenges for ecommerce sites in relation to usability?
2. How does usability fit with Conversion Optimisation (CRO)?
3. What free and paid tools can you use to help with usability?

Q1: “What are the big challenges for ecommerce sites in relation to usability?” Among the excellent answers were these 10 notes:

1. @aattias: Data & the management headache that comes with it, esp for etailers with 1000s of SKUs.
2. @geake: Managing a consistent buying process when the customer could be on a desktop/mac/iphone/ipad/android etc.
3. @welshmike: scheduling time into dev roadmap to trial new usability theories
4. @JonnyChats: Understanding the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.
5. @mcmillanstu: our biggest challenge is project management and developer time, even though we have quite a lot of resource
6. @aattias: internal knowledge/skill/appreciation on importance of usability
7. @projectocto: external appreciation of usability too (ie. clients)
8. @gingerwarriorx: Information Architecture is always tricky. Displlaying the widest range yet allow customers to find a specific sku… and consistent merchandising across devices – regular users have that ‘comfort factor’
9. @mcmillanstu: I’ve seen plenty examples of branding and usability coming into conflict… and the biggest challenges will come when companies don’t build usability into their other processes. It needs to be ‘baked in’.
10. @rubenlightfoot: Constant fast-paced technology change.

James Gurd asked for a definition of usability. A few among this included:

• @carmenmardiros: Usability: How easily the customer can follow through with their own agenda (whatever decision stage they’re at)
• @kevinwaugh: anything that makes the customer’s journey easier for them.

Both of these were echoed by a few people. A few of the ‘struggles’ that seemed to resonate, and were repeated in various forms, were the following – summarised by Dan Barker:

1. Fitting usability work into development cycles.
2. Managing it across thousands of products.
3. Getting buy-in from ‘the business’.
4. Convincing others its a priority, or even what it means!
5. Doing it in any sort of ‘agile’ manner without it becoming overblown, also avoiding it becoming a purely theoretical exercise.
6. Implementing outcomes within budget.

James Gurd asked how Usability & Conversion Optimisation fit together.

Q2: How does usability fit with Conversion Optimisation (CRO)?

A handful of the answers to this included James Gurd & Andrew Girdwood discussing

• @andrewgirdwood: [usability work] seems rather expensive and a little flakey compared to learnings from A/B testing
• @jamesgurd: for me, usability helps identify potential issues that can be filtered into a testing program for conversion rate optimisation to drive uplift.
• @andrewgirdwood: asked james – “but what about a newspaper or blog who just want to sell page impressions?”
• @jamesgurd: replied – “exactly – goal to press levers that support core business goals”

A couple of other comments on the crossover between usability & ‘conversion optimisation’ included:

• @danbarker: in my opinion conversion optimisation is basically usability from the business’s point of view
• @mcmillanstu: you need a virtuous circle of tools and instrumentation which produce results feeding into future activity.

And Stu’s note led us nicely into question 3:

Q3: What free and paid tools can you use to help with usability?

• @mcmillanstu: recommended eyequant, and also The Web Psych’s book.
• @aattias: listed 2 articles: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3950-23-Tools-to-Test-your-Ecommerce-Site and https://blog.prwd.co.uk/usability/ux101
• @gingerwarriorx: silverback for simple testing assumptions.
• @futurestatedigi: whatusersdo.com and clicktale.com
• @jamesgurd: crazy egg, especially their scroll maps, and Google Analytics content experiments as a free basic A/B test tool.
• @stephengreen33: recommended the ghostery chrome plugin for figuring out which tools other sites are using.

 

And with that, the hour was up.

Do leave a note in the comments if you have any more you regularly use. And – do spread the word to anyone you think may be interested, or join in if you’re free at 1pm UK time. Otherwise, simply follow the #EcomChat hashtag on Twitter.

Thanks!

Dan & James.

p.s. If you’re wondering “what is this all about?”, there is an about page to explain everything.