Anyone who works on websites for a living and has had anything to do with the production of an e-commerce facility will appreciate the consequences of a poor user experience.
As web professionals who often make online purchases on several different merchant web sites, we will examine our own user experience and scrutinising said merchants e-commerce process. Today I had the dis-pleasure of attempting to purchase nearly $1500 worth of computer components on the website of a popular Perth based computer supplier. For the sake of not directly naming names, lets just call them Boston Computers.
My shopping experience (or how things went from bad to worse)
Everything looked fine (1995-esque aesthetics aside) and I was happily adding products to my shopping cart – until everything went pear shaped. After adding each product to my cart I was redirected to my cart summary page as expected, but then some of the products I added began to appear in a new separate cart. So suddenly I had a cart with some products, and another cart with the other products.
Upon closer investigation I was able to work out the problem. Some of the product URLs are prefixed with www. while others are not. So adding products was creating two separate carts (dumb, I know). To “fix” this issue I emptied the cart that was full of non-www products and before adding them again, I manually typed www. at the start of the product URL. Now I had a single shopping cart with everything I needed.
Usability Ranking: 0
That was actually the pleasant part of the experience. Now things got worse.
Proceeding to checkout asked me to login or create an account, though that page was such a dysfunctional mess I could easily see less savvy users getting confused there. I logged in with the company credentials, entered our credit card details, hit submit and waited “for up to one minute” as directed. As a side note I should mention that this was the most depressing looking credit card gateway page I have ever seen. It lacked any credibility and looked plain untrustworthy. I can’t imagine anyone going beyond this point based on that alone (but I’m sure some do).
Back on track, after about a minute I am suddenly looking at an unformatted xml tree in the browser (I kid you not) with no usable information except for one branch reading something to the affect of “session expired”. If that was true, then apparently sessions only last up to one minute. I also briefly wondered if perhaps this xml tree would be able to render something human readable in a different browser – perhaps the same browser the developers tested it in, but alas I was using the latest Firefox at the time.
Any regular user would have left at this stage without even bothering to decipher the coded information. But I’d already invested a lot of time and chose to call the merchant to see what could be done at this point. They suggested I email the order instead, and of course that meant locating all my products again and pasting them into an email to send. I don’t even know how to pay for it yet. If they ask me to email my credit card details I will literally fall of my chair.
Convenience Factor: 0
At this stage I decided to take it further and imagine what some more adventurous users might do, so I hit the back button in the browser. After what appeared to be a quick succession of redirects, I was suddenly staring at what appeared to be a Westpac Bank account authentication screen asking me for a password. Not a specific password, just – you know – a general password.
I went back another page and arrived at my original cart (composing the email order would have been easier if I’d known this would happen) and noticed the “proceed to payment” button had disappeared, so I couldn’t see any way of trying again. But then it hit me that the ‘delivery method’ and ‘payment method’ options had reset themselves back to default (no selection). Making my sections again revealed the payment button. Sigh.
Next action: Close – Tab
My impression
If I had to guess I’d suggest the shopping and checkout process was designed by a developer with absolutely no user experience background (Captain Obvious). When this happens, and we’ve all seen it before, you end up with a system designed by programmers made for programmers (no offence to my fellow programmers), and that doesn’t help regular Joe hand over his hard earned money so easily if at all.
The thing is, getting the shopping experience right is actually not very difficult. There are hundreds of user cases online to even help a beginner e-commerce developer produce a reasonable user experience. Or at least one that doesn’t suck to the point of encouraging cart abandonment.
Will I use it again?
No. How could I? This is not uncommon for other users who have had similar experiences. Though they might eventually fix these problems when I make them aware, there is no way of knowing when that might be, or if the user experience will have improved overall. I don’t have the time to waste risking failure again. It’s easier to try one of the many alternatives.
How can things be improved
In the case with this particular experience it’s easy to pinpoint the areas and plan for improvement. But generally speaking here are some pointers for a good shopping cart experience.
Remember user choices
If the user has made choices (in the case of this article choosing shipping and payment options) don’t revert them back to their default state at any stage. If the user doesn’t take the time to find the problem created by your lazy programming, you may lose them forever.
Make the summary and cart modification pages easy to comprehend
Displaying all the items in a cramped table with microscopic buttons and inputs for modifying the cart contents makes for a good exercise in frustration. Allow generous white-space and make the modification tools easy to comprehend and use.
Make the account login and signup page easy to comprehend
Similar to the cart summary mentioned above, make it obvious that I need to login with an existing account or create a new one. These are two separate actions and should be presented as such.
Explain the process so users know what to expect
As users don’t always know what is going to happen once they hit that payment button, it would be good to let them know what to expect. Because not all payment gateways systems are the same, this will assist them in deciding if something went wrong or not, instead of possibly waiting for a message or action that might not even happen.
Provide helpful information along the way, including suggestions of what can be done if things don’t work out as expected
Provide plenty of help topics and offer alternative suggestions in the event that something doesn’t work as they expected. You shouldn’t leave it up to the user to troubleshoot your broken system.
Look credible
If your payment gateway looks like it was made in 1990 by a back-yard HTML hacker, you won’t instil any confidence in potential customers.
Test, test and test again
Dog-fooding can only take you so far because you’re already intimate with how your own system works (making for partially unreliable testing). Get external parties from different demographics (yes, including your client) to test your shopping experience and take their feedback on-board.
