# Presentation: 145841

## Factors and Principles Affecting the Usability of Four E-commerce Sites

## Purpose of E-commerce Research

- To provide customers and practitioners with information that will assist them in designing effective e-commerce sites

## The process for this research

- Establishing a working group from all parts of the company to work on developing a white paper and e-commerce guidelines
- To support the working group--conducted an initial study to pinpoint factors that we need to focus on in more detail

## Methods for initial study

- 18 participants; 16 for data evaluation
- Participants used and compared 2 sites that sold clothing, 2 sites that sold computer products
- They stated what they liked and disliked

- They stated what would encourage and discourage them from buying
- They were asked which site they preferred and why
- They rated factors that might affect usability

## Participants

- Half had purchased items online; half had not
- Recruited by a placement agency
- Participants tended to be well educated professionals (requirement was that they had used the web)

## Familiar Problems/Issues

- Unspecified link destinations (caused problem for 75% of participants)
- A link or just a decorative graphic? (caused problems for 63%)
- Inadequate search mechanisms, couldn’t search with multiple parameters at Computer Site A
- Wordy text; poor type design (38% complained about it)

## Familiar Issues

- Categorization remains very important
- Supporting easy navigation to any one of a thousand items is challenging (25% didn’t like use of dropdown menus)
- Time/effort navigating to product from the homepage (Clothing Site A required 7 clicks; 25% of the participants thought the process took too long)

## A graphic or a link/button?

- Ten out of sixteen participants did not at first recognize this as the order link/button

## Unspecified Link Destination

## Support for navigating to merchandise

- 25% indicated they disliked these dropdown menus

## Support for navigating to merchandise

- 31% commented they liked the simple menu list at Clothing Site B

## Support users with helpful categorization of merchandize

- 25% of participants indicated they were very pleased that the monitors were categorized by size

## New Issues with E-commerce

- Because transaction oriented, UI feedback becomes very important
- 31% of the participants thought an item had been added to the shopping cart when it hadn’t been
- Feedback to confirm order has been received was second most important factor affecting decision to buy
- knowing items were saved in cart was 13th

## Slide 14

## New Issues with E-commerce

- Security issues: How does a site communicate/guarantee that it is secure?
- Credit card security rated as the most important issue in determining whether  participants would buy online

## New Issues with E-commerce

- Commerce features that are really attractive to customers can nevertheless confuse the buying process if not well executed
- at Clothing Site B, 56% of participants mistook the “wish list” as a  shopping cart
- 19% didn’t know the purpose of the compare feature at Computer Site A; 56% never commented on it

## Slide 17

## New Issues with E-commerce

- Support for the ordering process: Do I need to log in? When do I provide personal information?
- 56% of participants at some point thought they needed to log in or register when they didn’t need to

## Slide 19

## New Issues with E-commerce

- Product pictures are very important
- 31% of participants complained about lack of pictures of computer products
- 1 person did not want product pictures slowing load time

## New Issues with E-commerce

- More opportunity for flexibility, versatility: provide opportunity to buy anywhere product is listed/discussed
- 2 participants (13%) said they wanted to be able to order from places they couldn’t order

## New Issues with E-commerce

- Flexibility for customers who want to continue shopping
- 25% of participants expressed some frustration about the shopping loop
- Reversibility
- 38% said they wanted to be able to edit (mostly delete) items in shopping cart
- ability to edit purchase order list was 4th most important factor affecting decision to buy

## Suggestions

- Based on observing participants and on accepted UI design principles
- Not statistically significant or validated in a controlled experiment

## Suggestions

- Consider providing a persistent view of the shopping cart (31% thought they had added an item to cart when they hadn’t)
- Minimize the number of levels that users must navigate to view items (19% said  process took too long at Clothing Site A)
- Provide ways to narrow lists of products (44% disliked looking through long lists)

## Suggestions

- When using extra features like a “compare” or a registry, make sure the extra functionality does not complicate the ordering process (for 56% it did at Clothing Site B)
- Use dropdown menus only when they add value (25% disliked their application at Clothing Site A)

## Suggestions

- Use concise writing with bulleted information when describing products (38% complained about wordy/poorly designed text layout)
- Study how your users will want and expect products to be organized
- Observe representative users using your site; do competitive comparisons

## Further Research

- How do designers communicate that a site is secure?
- Prototype of persistent shopping cart
- Prototypes of what happens, what options are available, as far as navigation is concerned, after an item is added to the shopping cart