| Usability for Electronic Shops (December 1999) Archived at Pineapplesoft |  | |||
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The Pineapplesoft Link newsletter covered a wide range of technical topics, see the archived issues. The newsletter was first emailed in 1998. In 2001 Benoît discontinued it in favour of professional writing for magazines. The “Usability for Electronic Shops (December 1999)” page was archived in 2003 to preserve the original content of December 1999. | ||||
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Like in the brick-and-mortars world, a friendly shop online is a successful one. A friendly shop on the Internet is simple to use and works well. Usability for Electronic Shops This month I return to a favorite subject of mine: the usability or the user interface for electronic shops. After the October issue on domain names, Les Paige from http://www.angelfire.com/ca/guppysplace pointed me to http://www.virtualave.com. The later site offers free virtual hosting. In other words, it's free like GeoCities but you can choose the domain name. Not a bad proposal! Frustrations Despite the never ending efforts of the Belgian rail, I still take the train. I say despite the efforts from the Belgian rail. I do not like travelling by train, nobody does: trains are uncomfortable, noisy and always late. Furthermore the cashiers and other employees do a very effective job at discouraging travellers. Yet, for all its faults, I still take the train because it there is no useful alternative. Belgian railway is a keen reminder that if you have no competition, you are always better than your competitors. You see, I regularly travel around Europe and, with the train, I am sure of two things: I will arrive later than announced and I will have a chance to write or read. I can turn unproductive travelling hours in productive time. It is the latter, of course, that makes it desirable. Unfortunately for the Belgian railway, it doesn't make for loyal customers. Give me an alternative and I'll jump at it. How I long for the end of the state monopoly. The same is true on-line. Too many electronic shops are built on the assumption that they have no competition. Being there is good enough for these merchants. Loyal Customers There was a time when you could create an electronic shop and rest assured it would be successful because there was no competition. This is not true anymore. Electronic shops are finding that a loyal customer base is required to prosper. It is no longer enough to have people visit the shop once, order and be gone with it. You want them to return again and again. And keep buying. How do you make sure that your electronic shop attracts loyal customers? Unfortunately there is not a simple formula that guarantees success. Instead you need to continuously work to refine your offering. As you progress pay particular attention to the following two elements: listen to your customers and avoid error messages. Listening to Customers Listening to customers looks easy in theory but it is hard work in practice. You need to provide mechanisms to collect feedback. You can start with an email address but you quickly want to add surveys and, maybe, a discussion forum. Next you need analyze the feedback: identify trends, sort good and bad ideas. Don't underestimate this effort, you need people to sort through the mail and reply. Finally, and this may be the most difficult part, you need to act on this feedback. Customers will challenge your assumptions and force you to come with innovative ideas. Take criticism for what it is: a chance to improve. We tend to dismiss anything critical instead of taking the chance to improve. As you collect feedback, pay particular attention to those customers reporting errors. When something goes wrong, you want a specific procedure to identify the problem and fix it. Avoiding Errors Make it a rule to banish error messages from your web site! Error messages are frustrating for your customers: they came to your site looking for a solution and you put the blame on them. It is easy, when writing software, to throw error messages when the user does not behave as you are expecting. However the user is a customer so think twice. It takes lots of work to analyze the errors and come up with intelligent alternatives but it is worth it! An error message indicates your failure, not the customer's failure. With some imagination, you can turn any error message into a positive comment. I have a simple strategy that works in 80% cases: if I lack information, I use sensible defaults. For example, if a search fails to return the product the user was looking for, I return a list with the most popular products instead. If the user access a non-existing page, I present him with a site map. Conclusion You know that it requires a lot of efforts to build a brand but you can ruins these efforts in minutes. Be careless with your customers is all it takes -- like this train being late again. On the web, your software is your representative. If the software is careless or fails to meet your customers expectations then you are loosing sales. Self-promotion department Gamelan published "A first look at Jini lookup and discovery protocols" at http://www.gamelan.com/journal/techfocus/110499_jini.html. It has been a long time since I last wrote for Gamelan and a new article is already in the making! I updated my popular "Introduction to SGML" and re-published it as e-Matter. For more information, visit http://www.psol.be/lib/2003/0909a.html. Online Bookstore Pineapplesoft Link online bookstore is your resource to selected high-quality books on the topics covered by Pineapplesoft Link. Visit Pineapplesoft Link Bookstore at http://www1.fatbrain.com/FindItNow/Services/home.cl?from=PHP278. Pineapplesoft Link receives a percentage on any book purchased by someone entering from our web site or the newsletter. Please consider shopping for books through our bookstore, you are not limited to the books listed and it helps with the cost of running the newsletter. About Pineapplesoft Link Pineapplesoft Link is a free email magazine. Each month, it discusses technologies, trends and facts of interest to web developers. The information and design of this issue of Pineapplesoft Link are owned by Benoit Marchal and Pineapplesoft. Permission to copy or forward it is hereby granted provided it is prefaced with the words: "As appeared in Pineapplesoft Link - http://www.pineapplesoft.com." Editor: Benoit Marchal Acknowledgments: thanks to Sean McLoughlin MBA for helping me with this issue. Back issues are available at http://www.psol.be/old/1/newsletter/. Although the editor and the publisher have used reasonable endeavors to ensure accuracy of the contents, they assume no responsibility for any error or omission that may appear in the document. Last update: December 1999. |