Is your Web site as easy to navigate as the local store on Main Street? If it’s like most e-commerce sites, probably not.
Delays in loading pages, hard-to-follow ordering procedures and an overabundance of graphics are just some of the numerous pitfalls that can hamper a Web site’s usability. These problems affect both large and small retail sites.
“Yes, the quality of the experience someone has shopping online isn’t what it should be,” says New York-based e-commerce consultant Judy Boros. “Even the benchmark sites, like Amazon.com, don’t make it as easy as you’d expect if you look at the process from the user’s perspective. It only looks good if you’ve got very low expectations, which most Internet professionals, who are too close to the technology, do have.”
So how do you get a consumer’s perspective? Forrester Research suggests employing usability labs, which are formal settings where users are observed performing tasks on a client’s Web site or on a prototype. The recent brief from Forrester mentions two usability firms, User Interface Engineering [http://www.uie.com] and Human Factors International [http://www.humanfactors.com].
Software companies are offering other options for site administrators. Massachusetts-based WebSpective Inc. [http://www.webspective.com/] has recently developed new software to address Web site usability. The company is now offering a new add-on to its e-commerce platform that measures commerce usability — something akin to the standard quality of service, or QoS ratings in the telecommunications world. The software, called QuEST (Quality of Experience Site Tracking) offers companies real-time reports of their sites’ activity and performance from the user perspective.
Tom Henry, vice president of marketing at WebSpective, sees the real- time, highly specific nature of his new product as its saving grace. “E-business sites are concerned about quality of service in transaction and content-critical environments,” he says. “They need to be able to measure service levels in real-time, and react to potential problems before customers are affected.”
However, others believe the true obstacle to usability is not lack of knowledge on the part of e-tailers, but a lack of commitment to improve their sites’ usability.
“The problem,” says one California-based designer, “isn’t that we can’t figure out that these sites are less than dazzling. It’s that the owners need to invest real money and thought into making it better, and for the most part they just don’t want to. I could see this as a sales tool — so you can say to your client, ‘Look, you got a low usability score, you should invest in improving it.’ But lack of understanding isn’t the issue. The issue is that it costs a lot today to get over the barriers we’re talking about, and even the bigger sites aren’t interested in those large investments for what are largely intangibles.”
