The Psychology of Faceted Navigation

When we use Google to explore the web, we’re happy to accept the fact that we’re venturing through a wild, open and sprawling information space. There’s always the possibility there’s a haystack out there we haven’t discovered yet, and in it, there might be some great needles that we want to find out about. Sometimes that’s part of the fun.

Our expectations are very different when we search an individual website. For example, when we carry out a search on a classifieds or e-commerce site, we expect it to be able to show us every single item it has that matches our criteria. To use an analogy, imagine if you went into camera shop on the high street and asked to see all of their digital SLRs. Imagine if the sales assistant responded by showing you a few cameras, but then admitted that there might be more items in the back room, possibly better deals, and that you’d need to try re-articulating your requirements in various different ways to find out. A crazy idea. You’d think they were incompetent and walk out.

A shop assistant should know what stock they have, and they should be able to match it against your requirements. The same goes for websites.

10 Absentee UX Features on Top e-Commerce Sites

eCommerce sites are competing for customer attention and loyalty. The user experience features included in a site are the focal points for engaging customers, and can make or break the purchase process.

But UX features aren’t free. In some cases, they are very, very expensive. Selecting the right feature set is an exercise that should be as well-informed as possible, and should take into account available resources, industry best practices, and the competitive landscape.

Usography reviewed 100 top e-commerce sites for its recently published Retailer UX Audit. In the process of conducting the audit, we were surprised to discover the user experience features that were missing from top e-commerce sites, sites that receive millions of visitors per month, and earn millions of dollars in revenue.

Here we’ll take a look at ten UX features that were missing from 90 percent or more of the sites we reviewed for the Spring 2011 UX Audit. We selected these features (from the complete feature list) based on their infrequent occurrence on e-commerce sites, and on their potential to engage customers and increase sales. They are presented below in order of decreasing occurrence. In parentheses next to each feature is the number of sites we reviewed that had the feature in the Spring 2011 UX Audit.

Mobile Social Media Usage Affects Shopping Habits

Consumers trust friends’ opinions and access them on the go while shopping

As more consumers access social media via mobile devices, it changes the way they research and shop for products and services offline.

Knowledge Networks and MediaPost Communications surveyed teen and adult social media users for “The Faces of Social Media” study and found that, in May 2011, 40% of respondents accessed social media via their mobile phones. This was an increase from 28% who reported doing the same in September 2010.

Additionally, 37% of US social media users trust what their friends and family members say about a brand or product on social media, compared to only 10% who trust what strangers say. Drilling down to specific social elements, 26% trust what friends and family members say in blog posts, 25% trust their posts on social media sites and 20% trust their tweets. This is compared to 7% who trust the blogs and posts of strangers, and 5% who trust strangers’ tweets.

7 Useful Design Strategies for a Successful Pricing Table

One of the most important and difficult pages to design for web applications is the pricing table. When users get to your pricing table, they likely have a basic understanding of your web application and what you offer. Now, they want to know how much they have to pay to use your application. If your pricing table isn’t effectively designed for conversions, you are probably losing potential customers. However, these seven design strategies can prevent that from happening, and convert interested users into paying customers.

1. Soften the Pricing

Users who look at your pricing table want to know the price to each of your plans. However, don’t make it glaringly obvious that they are spending money by emphasizing the pricing. The more they feel like they’re spending their hard-earned money, the less they’ll spend. Instead, soften the pricing and put more focus on the benefits and features of each plan.

How To Use Google AdWords To Reach The People Who Didn’t Click On Your Ad

Have you ever been stalked… by an ad?

I have. It started when I clicked on an ad for a fitness product. I read through their sales page, considered the offer, and honestly, I was tempted to buy – but I decided not to.

It didn’t end there.

I started to notice this company’s ads everywhere – on Google searches, on image ads while reading completely unrelated sites, and even on YouTube videos.

One day, I was thinking about getting back into shape, and I bumped into the same ad again. I clicked through, and bought the product.

Clearly, stalking me worked for this company – so let’s talk about how you can do the same!

How To Engage Customers In Your E-Commerce Website

One of the most influential factors in our buying decisions is the opinions of our friends and relatives. Likewise, a large majority of online shoppers now trust what other customers say about the products they buy more than the e-tailers themselves. The reason is that we trust people who are “on our side,” even if we do not know them personally.

This attitude was described as the “Amazon effect” by Joshua Porter in his book Designing for the Social Web. He observed during his tests that people always started shopping on Amazon first. Their main reason was not that Amazon was better or that they had an Amazon account; they simply knew that on Amazon they could always find trustworthy information provided by people like them. They wanted to know the “truth,” not an idealistic vision of the product decorated by marketing cliches.

UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success: A Conversation with Greg Nudelman

Did you know that there are big profits to be made from no-search-results pages? Have you ever considered that your customers’ search results—rather than the products you offer for sale on your site—have the potential to make or break sales online? I hadn’t, until I read Greg Nudelman’s book, Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success.

As businesses strive to reach the elusive brass ring of the ultimate ecommerce experience—replicating the success of the customer-centric shopping experiences of the bricks-and mortar-world—Nudelman’s book can definitely help them to get closer to their business goals. I recently caught up with Greg to discuss his book, which covers ecommerce site search across desktop and mobile platforms.

How Social Commerce Really Works & Why

GroupOn might be darlings of the web right now, but as the launch of Facebook Deals shows, the game is far from over and we have just now taken first steps towards what is real (online) social commerce. I had briefly touched upon what the future of social commerce looks like in my April 19 edition of my e-newsletter, Om Says, So What Comes After Social Commerce.

The crux of my argument was that if the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce is about recreational shopping where the merger of social and interest graphs would drive buying decisions.

Marketing: Don’t be a Hater

Since starting at Adaptive Path I’ve discovered a few words that cause unexpected reactions in people from nervous tics to outright diatribes.

Included on this list are “branding,” “advertising,” and “marketing.” This was a bit of a shock for me having come from the world of advertising and graphic design. From what I can tell, the reactions are based on the notion that advertising and marketing are manipulative. And the belief that UX designers create useful services while advertisers use people.

I would like to challenge this perspective and point out some things I have learned in the world of advertising and marketing that have made me a better UX designer.

Design Guidelines For E-commerce Product Pages With Eyetracking Data

According to IMRG/Capgemini, it is estimated that UK shoppers spent £13.16bn online in the last quarter of 2008. This is 15% more than the last quarter of 2007.

On the other hand, a statistic by Jupiter Research in September 2007 shows that 42% of 1,179 online shoppers surveyed have left a site without buying a number of products because they were unable to find answers to questions about a product in their shopping basket.

Why and what we wanted to do

I carried out a series of eye tracking studies at cxpartners to look into what shoppers need and prefer to see on a product page to help them make a decision on which products to buy. I also aimed to find out what the best design might be for a product page in helping customers: (1) to be more interested in the product they are about to buy; and (2) to easily find other items that they might need.

Elements that have been looked into in this study include: content of the page (product description, delivery), design (page, fonts, colours), features (recommendations, customers’ reviews) and layout (two versus three columns).