E-Commerce User Experience
- Article 21 of 77
- Information Age, October 2001
Nielsen's latest foray into design guidelines is a meticulous study of how shoppers interact with ecommerce sites. Anyone designing an ecommerce site – and who can afford the RRP – should keep it by his or her side at all time.
In the 1980s, when Apple was lovingly crafting the Macintosh computer, it invested millions researching how people interacted with its newly devised graphic user interface. As a result of the research, Apple modified the Macintosh interface repeatedly and extensively, and devised a strict set of guidelines for developers to ensure they would create consistent interfaces that were intuitive to the way users wanted to work or play.
No one ever did the same for the web — but Jakob Nielsen comes close. For years, he has been championed as the world's leading guru on the design of web sites, and his latest project, an extensive review of ecommerce sites and how groups of various users respond to them, cements that reputation.
The results have been meticulously recorded in E-Commerce User Experience. Nielsen, along with the rest of the researchers at the Nielsen Norman Group, has pieced together practical guidelines for anyone building or redesigning a web site.
The book is split into a set of executive summaries and sections that cover the more intricate findings of the group's studies. In contrast to most reports, though, the executive summaries are the only parts of the book that are not worth reading, consisting of doubtful insights such as the revelation that Amazon did not become the top ecommerce site because it is “named after a river”. The best that can be said about the summaries is that they might get executives who think their sites are paragons of usability to think again.
Instead, the book's virtues are in the almost object-by-object analysis of the good and bad points of the sites under review (all US and Danish, betraying Nielsen's roots and adopted homeland). Almost every page has three or four “DOs” and “DON'Ts”: these usually focus on details that the average design team does not consider when building a site, but which can make or break the site's usability — and, hence, popularity and profitability.
The screen-capture images of sites and anecdotes from users liven up what could have been a dry tome (the analysis of where sports retailer Boo.com went wrong on web design, with such useful advice as “Miss Boo should be shot”, is a case in point). And the unexpected reactions to sites by users show that there's often a gulf between how designers expect online shoppers to use and understand their sites and what actually happens when the sites go live.
The report does have flaws, however: a study that limits itself to US and Danish users is not going to provide a complete picture of the cultural diversity of the web; and its occasional use of hyperbole – where every incomplete transaction is seen as a “sales catastrophe” – sometimes detracts from its useful messages. Nevertheless, anyone concerned that his or her site is not performing as it should is well advised to invest in a copy.