Good User Experience = Good Customer Service = More Sales
Christmas shopping has begun and with it, the stress! And no, I haven’t been shopping offline at all, I’ve been shopping online! But this time of the year always brings to the fore one of the most obvious issues that many Ecommerce Managers have control of, but yet remains to be one of the most lacking in terms of solutions.
Picture this: you go into a store where a very nice assistant helps you find everything you need to purchase. You’re thinking “Great! All my Christmas shopping done in an hour!”.
You walk on up to the till point where the assistant starts totting up all of your purchases, but the sales assistant then suddenly tells you that you can’t actually pay at their till unless you have a specific device. So you…
An introduction to responsive website design for marketers
The Olympics were fantastic this year, the atmosphere was electric and the performances were first class (not to mention Danny Boyle's staggering opening ceremony).
The only problem that I had was that I kept on missing the first and last 5 metres of each race. You see, my television is very old, and can’t cope with content that has been created for the panoramic screen. If only my television was as responsive as an increasing number of websites...
So What is the Responsive Web?
Responsive Website Design (RWD) is a concept widely attributed to Ethan Marcotte, who takes inspiration from the experimental movement Responsive Architecture (see pioneering Nicholas Negroponte for further reading).
The aim of RWD is to create one website design that adapts to each environment that it is being viewed in. Whether being viewed from a traditional PC browser, or perhaps a new android tablet,…
An introduction to the value of investing in User Experience Design
It seems there’s a myth accepted by some in online marketing that UX isn’t needed; simply put, “let’s just make it look good” is the attitude, but I believe this a dangerous stance to take.
To explain why, let’s start by looking at what User Experience Design (UX) is and what it does.
In layman's terms I'd say:
"UX is designing something to give the user the best experience and to tasks to be completed easily and efficiently as possible".
Usability is at the heart of UX, we want the user to be able to complete their tasks as easily as possible, to be satisfied with the experience. Take this common real world example:
This door gets me every morning! There’s actually a push…
Design, Content or Brand .. is one more important than the other in (re)designing your website?
Website design can be an opinionated business. These opinions are sometimes informed, sometimes not. Occasionally the opinions are not necessarily to do with the design itself, but more to do with the politics within a business.
Personally I am all for design of any nature to be stress tested by a client or the market. However, how many of us have made changes to a successful website design, just so we feel like we have been involved?.
We also need to recognise that website design is a fluid process. We are dealing with an entity that is constantly evolving. This means that when creating a new website design, the Designer has to take into consideration multiple facets; including:
is the website 'on brand' (or does it look…
The perils of Professional Services websites and ten tips on how to avoid the common mistakes.
As we continue to move towards an online world where more and more visits will come from mobile devices, we still have thousands of professional firms either with a poor online presence or even more alarmingly without ANY website at all.
In this post I'll talk about some of the common problems I see daily in professional services websites when benchmarking against competitors. Whether it's sites for accountants, solicitors, law firms or even marketing agencies and consultants, these problems are surprisingly common.
The 10 most common mistakes and how to avoid them
Mistaking Landing Pages with History Pages. Websites should be for the benefit of the visitor, not the client’s ego. Buyers of Professional Services have other concerns first before they care how long you have been in business, how many…
A resource to help inform targeting platforms for site design
I was recently recommended NetMarketShare by @JamesGurd it was a new source to me, so I thought it would share since it’s sometimes useful to have data on the most popular platforms like browsers and screen resolutions to benchmark against. Of course, a business will know how its own users access the site through its own analytics, but it’s still useful to get an idea of trends of technologies you intend to invest more on in future.
Previously global analytics services like Hitbox (remember that?) used to be good sources which published their results, but I don’t know of any similar commercial analytics services that still do. Do you?
Methodology and data sources
You have to be really careful with these sources to make sure that…
Timeline shows the increasing complexity of web standards
This new HTML 5 infographic from Evolution of the Web reminds us about the power, but also the complexity of developing and delivering web services today.
It shows how the web standards delivered through different browsers (show on each timeline row) have changed from here:
to here:
The infographic itself shows the experiences it's possible to create today in HTML 5, but suggests the difficulty in making them compatible across different browsers. On a positive note, it shows that new standards are now generally implemented more quickly across browsers.
I've also posted this infographic since it gives and introduction to different web standards if you rollover the interactive version:
…
Every website owner wants to know how visitors behave on their website, but how do you get all that information and how can you improve your pages with it?
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics can give you some good information about previous pages and the most popular links, but to show interactions in detail, additional tools are often useful. It’s these specialist tools that I focus on this review.
For more background on applying heatmaps to improve sites, see these two tutorials:
Using Heatmaps to Optimize your Site (Referral Candy - shows examples Click, Scroll and Mouse movement heatmaps)
Using Clickmaps to Understand your viewers - a nice summary of why and how to use heatmaps
There are various ways to collect more information about the behaviour of visitors on your website.…
Does your site pass the 2,4,6,8 second rule?
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Benchmark
We’ve shown through several recent posts that speed matters if you want to maximise conversion. The Walmart example in our previous post showed how conversion rate drops dramatically below 4 seconds, so this is a good rule of thumb in evaluations.
Today, Google has released a new compilation that helps companies compare their performance to this.
It has 3 different benchmarks:
This supports the data from our previous post - suggesting that desktop sites need to render in less than 4 seconds:
Google notes that you can check out the site speed reports in Google Analytics to see how you compare. Remember that averages across the whole site can be deceptive…
A key mobile design trend in 2013
Mobile usage is only going one way. Up. Rapidly.
[caption id="attachment_9550" align="aligncenter" width="537" caption="UK mobile adoption exploding: 27 million regular users, 54% of all mobile users. Source: Comscore."][/caption]
But how good are the experiences we're building for customers? Designing experiences on mobile is challenging because of the form factor and because it's a relatively new design approach with the tools and technologies evolving fast. Brands also want to get to market fast.
Today's mobile designs often fail to differentiate brands
These challenges can lead to some "screen scrape" design approaches where every site looks similar, with little differentiation of brand or experience. These 4 retail sites show this:
Don't get be wrong, these sites show a lot of features of good…
