Monday, November 30, 2009

Shiny New Toy Syndrome: Crippling your Web presence?

Is your Web presence hobbled by Shiny New Toy Syndrome?

Used to be that the CEO was most prone to
Shiny New Toy Syndrome. (Actual quote from a major media boardroom: "ESPN's doing it... it must be working for them... why can't do that too?"). We tech types breathed a sigh of relief when Chief Technology Officers became commonplace, since the CTO is supposed to disabuse the CEO of the dancing sugarplums that usually surround Shiny New Toy.

Turns out CTOs are just as - if not more - susceptible to
Shiny New Toy Syndrome (SNTS). Especially when pushed in a flashy new demo from an 800-pound-gorilla vendor. Why does this happen?

Vendor schmoozing aside, this happens because the company has not established requirements. Sure, the toy is shiny, but: Does it meet your requirements? Does it duplicate the functionality of an existing, better-developed tool? Will it create ROI, or will it add a maintenance burden that you didn't plan to meet? Or is this yet another instance of the technologist's worst nightmare: Wishful thinking?

Major American businesses, associations, and scientific projects are losing time, money, and opportunity to SNTS. We see it on far too many projects. The cure: The creation of objective requirements - based on a coherent Web strategy - that set a standard for selection and implementation of technologies.

Play is clearly more fun than work. But CTOs are paid big salaries to make responsible decisions that affect the livelihoods of hundreds of people - not to mention the company's brand.

Toys are for kids.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Who exactly is taking my money? Poor usability = reduced online sales

It's ironic that online check-out - the point in ecommerce at which users are most sensitive - is the point where many Web sites fail to provide the brand consistency that users need to feel confident about entering personal information and credit card numbers.

Abrupt interface changes (from the main Web site to the ecommerce application) are the most common - and most destructive - usability problems on ecommerce sites. A startling new interface with different branding, combined with a new URL, will give pause to any user, regardless of technical literacy. They wonder: Am I on a different site? Is the privacy policy different? Who exactly is taking my money?


When someone decides to purchase from your Web site it's because they trust you and your brand. Our own research and usability testing has shown scores of users halting and not completing transactions when they encounter an unfamiliar screen at the point of interaction.

What caused this problem? Initially, many Web sites
did not have ecommerce functionality, so it was bolted on as an afterthought. Third-party applications were used as the ecom stopgap. Brands were not allowed to customize these interfaces. The result: A bumpy ride for the user, reduced sales for the company. See examples below of the inconsis

The solution: Bring ecom under your primary Web property so users trust you - leading to increased online sales. Plan for ecommerce within your information architecture.

Example of a third-party payment system

Clicking on conEdison's "Pay by credit card" option takes you to a third-party company that handles the payment. The transition is jarring for several reasons:
  • New URL doesn't mention conEdison
  • NCO logo replaces conEdison's in the upper left
  • New color scheme
  • New privacy statement.
The payment agency does responsibly provide a link to their own privacy policy and disclaimer that they are a third party that handles payments. Yet, other than the inserted conEdison logo, it's difficult to tell that this page relates at all to conEd's parent site.

Internet to the rescue of print? HP's MagCloud

Recently some of our brightest colleagues have been singing the praises of HP's MagCloud platform. The true value as we see it is the ability for publishers to leverage archived content, allowing readers/users to assemble customized print products that meet *their* priorities. According to HP, "MagCloud is a tool for a professional or mainstream publisher to create a publication that is sold before it is printed, but it can also be a consumer-driven self-publishing tool."

It's a logical step given what we've seen in the usability lab over the last ten years. Users will gravitate toward what interests THEM - *not* towards what publishers want them to see (thus the great value of "Related Content" links). There's a clear correlation in the music industry: People got tired of buying albums when they really just wanted a few songs. The industry fought the trend. Enter Napster and iTunes.

The publishing industry continues to be hobbled by 20th-century rules of engagement. What could happen if publishers, sitting on years of relevant content, allowed their readers to self-serve a product that is truly meaningful to them? What if educators could assemble special issues for their students? What if "love mark" readers - those who are diehard fans - could assemble their custom editions of anything from Arizona Highways to Playboy? Happy users. Targeted advertising opportunities. What a wonderful world it could be.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Ecommerce is alive, usability problems still rampant

Clearly ecommerce is far from dead - it leads growth in retail even during this global economic downtown. Yet usability problems, which negatively affect sales, are rampant. Why has this problem remained with us since ecommerce first began?

In August of 2001, the dot-crash was roaring, about to be amplified by the events of 9/11. Early obits for the Web were popular. So it was that usability eminence Jakob Nielson asked, "Did poor usability kill ecommerce?" At the time, Nielsen conducted usability testing of 496 users on 20 US-based sites; failure rates were 56%. Nielsen also estimated that 79% of the sites could increase sales by improving usability. What has changed? Well, ecommerce is no longer an experiment. From Internet Retailer: "Sales of the Top 500 online retailers grew 11.7% to $115.85 billion in 2008 from $103.69 billion in 2007 while Internet Retailer estimates the total retail sales market grew 1.4%."

So ecommerce usability problems have gone away, right? Wrong. In many of our usability tests (2000 - 2009), we've observed all kinds of users attempting to purchase online, and we've watched them abandon transactions for the same old reasons:
  • Clunky or incomprehensible checkout process
  • Brand inconsistency between the parent site and the ecommerce application
  • No evident privacy policy
  • Confusion returning to shopping after placing a purchase in the shopping cart
  • Failure of shopping carts to retain user choices
  • Asking users to complete extensive forms prior to checkout
These are user task path problems, with a dose of emotional intelligence in design sorely missing; look at ecommerce interfaces for a myriad of more straightforward (and unacceptable) UI problems that undermine users and impact sales.

There is no replacement for information architecture, user interface design, and user-centric task sequence design as processes required for usable ecommerce platforms. Companies that took the time to stabilize their ecom platform before adding a plethora of products are the winners.

If your business model relies on online sales, plan to increase those sales by conducting usability testing and investing in solid information design. Time to stop guessing.

Out-of-the-grid design - when is it a good idea?

My longtime partner in Internet adventure, @jackpowers, posted this today:

@Jack Powers Eff usability, I love great design. RT @onextrapixel Characteristics of Less Conventional Websites w/Examples http://bit.ly/19iDHq


So I checked it out. Jack's got excellent taste, and the examples provided by Charlotte at onextrapixel.com are gorgeous, modern, compelling.

My take: I adore great design. As a fine arts major, I remember grumbling about why we had to master still life before creating abstract works, about the excruciating color-chart exercises. Eventually I understood that I needed those fundamentals before I could truly abstract.

We'd love to see a Web full of sites like those at oneextrapixel. But as a working (not theoretical) information architect, I must say that the best candidates for this sort of visual design are professional visual designers and hip development shops (there are quite a few portfolios there) and, of course, entertainment, where the non-conventional approach has always been appropriate.

Information-rich Web sites need to have gotten Web 1.0 right before moving to the unconventional Web site. This means branding, strategy, user priorities, information architecturem user interface design. All the boring stuff that creates a truly usable Web site. Then we can (if justified by mission) move on to abstraction.

Jazz musicians must master the piece before they can improvise. We look forward to working with clients that have already mastered the Web fundamentals so we can take them to the next level. Until then, our job is to get them to master the fundamentals. And to keep an eye on beautiful design, so we can lead the there when the time is right.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Privacy policies: Impacting conversion and online sales?

The last few years have yielded discussions of the role of text in interface, or text as interface. Stepping away from conventional interface design for a moment, we applied the principle of text as interface to an evaluation of the privacy policies on Amazon.com and Yahoo.com.

What did we find?
We learned that Amazon's privacy policy is highly specific about the type of information it harvests about its users, whereas Yahoo glosses over much of the same information. The end result is the appearance of a lack of transparency on the part of Yahoo, compared to Amazon's extremely specific and open policy statement.



Why does this matter?
Our usability studies have shown that privacy policies and clarity of how well they're stated directly impacts a user's likelihood to complete an interaction.
Amazon and Yahoo both admit to collecting the following information:

  • Email address
  • Login, name and password
  • Cookie information
  • Address
  • Occupation
  • Social Security number
  • Personal descriptions/interests
  • Software and hardware attributes
  • IP address

What else is collected?
Yahoo remains vague, whereas Amazon specifies that the following information is collected and why:

  • Computer and connection information such as browser type, version, and time zone setting
  • Browser plug-in types and versions, operating system, and platform
  • The full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) clickstream to, through, and from our Web site, including date and time
  • Content of reviews and e-mails to us
  • The phone number you used to call our 800 number
Who else gets my information?
While both companies state that your information is shared with third parties and trusted partners, only Amazon lists names, which include:
  • Target
  • CD Now
  • Verizon Wireless
  • Sprint
  • AT&T
Google Dashboard - a move in the right direction

Google DashboardGoogle's announcement today of Google Dashboard is a start in creating greater transparency. It allows you to view and manage information that Google is currently capturing. For example, you can view privacy policies and manage setting for all your Google accounts such as Blogger, GMail and Chat, view which of your data is private and which is visible to others, and remove items from your Web history.

We at Interface Guru encourage you to make use of tools and services that openly declare their usage of your personal data. Facebook's lack of transparency has been a recent hot topic - and rightfully so. Stand up for your digital rights!