Customers get stressed if you make them work harder than they should have to on your website and your performance metrics such as bounce rate and conversion rate will suffer.

 CA (formerly Computer Associates) recently commissioned a study Web Stress - A Wake Up Call for European Business in which 13 volunteers wore skull caps to track their brain waves as they tried to search for and purchase a laptop PC and travel insurance. The study was conducted in Scotland by British usability experts Foviance. See some highlights here:

Brain wave analysis indicated that shoppers had to concentrate up to 50% more when using poorly performing websites, leading to greater agitation and stress.

It’s a given that when customers get frustrated they give up or go elsewhere – CA’s own (2009) estimates are that poor performance leads 40% of people to go to a competitor’s site and another 37% to give up entirely. What’s fantastic and exciting about the notion of tracking web stress is that this type of research gets us on the road to being able to measure usability; i.e. as well as experimenting with usability changes and their impact on conversion rates we’ll be able to:

1. Put an actual number on a website’s usability using an index or score.
2. Measure the impact on this Usability Index of making specific changes (e.g. improving Findability , changing design, streamlining checkout process).
3. Most excitingly, to create industry wide metrics that indicate the relationship between the usability index and performance metrics such as conversion rate. These metrics can then provide rule-of-thumb estimates as to how much an ecommerce site’s conversion rate is being held down by poor usability and what kind of improvement could be achieved if the site could move into the usability sweet spot.
   • My own guess is that the relationship between usability and website performance is something like an S-curve. Wouldn’t it be great if a retailer could find out they were at position A and by moving to position B they’d double their conversion rate?

   

   • This isn’t the whole story to conversion rate of course (other factors come into play) but adding this kind of knowledge to industry wisdom would help us all in a big way.

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week, a blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the color family filter on Endless.com.

Endless sells shoes, bags, and other accessories, and like most other online shoe retailers, they have the typical filters: Category, Brand, Size, Width, and Heel Height. Where Endless really shines, however, is in their Color Family filter.

Because there is such a wide variety of colors (especially in apparel), using it as a filter can present some challenges.  One common tactic is presenting all color names with no normalization. This leads to too many options requiring too much work on the part of the customer.

For example, here is the color filter from another online retailer who sells shoes. In order to view all blue shoes, the customer has to click Blue, Denim, Light Blue, Navy, and Turquoise! This means ten clicks to view all blue shoes (since the customer has to click to clear the selection each time in order to get back to this list.)

Endless has an elegant and intuitive solution to this problem: rather than displaying dozens of color names, they represent color with swatches, which the customer can then click on to see products in that color.

For example, clicking on the blue square returns the following products (and many more), despite the fact that the “official” colors for these products are Turquoise, Jetblue Quasar, Teal, Navy, and Onyx.

The solution Endless has implemented is well suited to customers’ needs. Color is a very visual attribute, and presenting a visual representation of color that doesn’t require reading an entire list is both intuitive and efficient. The word list of colors above contains only 50% more values than the swatch list from Endless, but takes far more time to process and allow the customer to reach a decision.

Which interface do you prefer? Have you seen this tactic used by other retailers? How could a similar idea be applied beyond just color?

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!

E-commerce websites contain lots of product information that is underutilized. I know this professionally because structured product data is our business. Macys.com, is a favorite shopping site of mine, and was the obvious place to go when I needed to get a blazer in a hurry for our trip to the IRWD conference.

Normally when I shop online, I have some familiarity with the product I'm buying. But in the case of blazers, I was clueless. I didn’t own a blazer and didn’t know any of the relevant attributes. All I knew is they needed to match the various slacks I own, and of course I wanted something with style.

Unfortunately, after searching for "Mens Blazer" and refining by Blazer > Mens, I became stuck. I was presented with a list of 134 blazers and limited options for navigation.

I could narrow results by Brand, Special Size, Mens Waist Size (which seems wrong for a jacket), and Color, but I wasn't ready to make decisions based on these attributes. I wanted to get a sense of the Materials, Styles, and Patterns that were available.

Being in the product data and attribute business, I knew this information was probably available to me, just not easily accessible and usable. To get at this unstructured information I would have to click on the product details for each item.

I found one blazer that looked pretty clean, and looked at the attributes:

- Material: Linen; cotton

- Style: Two button front; Flap pockets; Side vents

- Lapel: Notch

It has some features that I like. But are there any others like this one? What other kinds of materials do they have? Do I have to buy a blazer that is Dry Clean Only? What about patterns?

I had recently read a Smashing Magazine article about How Hard It Can Be to Shop at Macy’s. They were shopping for bed sheets, but experienced the same limited filter options. I could have left the site, but I was confident that Macy's had a good blazer, and I was determined to buy one. Macy’s faceted navigation was failing me, so I took matters into my own hands.

I grabbed all of their product data for blazers, and ran it through our system, to bring out all of the unemployed attributes and attribute values that were present. Look at the rich structure that was produced:

By adding important attributes to help filter results, I turned a potential hour long shopping session into a quick, focused buying session. I gained confidence that Macy’s had what I wanted, and spent time purchasing rather than exploring. I ended up going to the store to make sure the blazers looked good on me (decided to buy 2), but that is the subject of another post.

If Macy’s were to make these attributes available to everyone how much of an improvement in key shopping metrics (bounce rate, conversion rate) do you think they’d get? And how much would the clickstream of the attributes chosen by consumers to refine their search be worth to Macy’s in terms of tailoring their website to meet customers needs?

Amazon has emerged as the 800–lb gorilla of E-Commerce and some pundits believe that smaller retailers will get squashed in the expected slugfest between Amazon and Walmart. Based on my own experience with Amazon, however, I’m not at all sure.

I LOVE Amazon and buy everything I can there. Often, as is increasingly the case with many shoppers, I’ll go straight to Amazon and search for what I want before – or without -trying anywhere else. I’m an Amazon Prime member and 2–day free shipping is fabulous – especially when shipping from another retailer costs an arm and a leg. On average I buy something from Amazon once per week – last year I spent a little over $3000.

On the other hand, Amazon constantly drives me nuts because their Findability in some areas – particularly electronics and computers is annoyingly poor. It’s OK if you know exactly what you want but if you need to look at and understand alternatives, choosing the right product on Amazon can be a real pain because the attributes you need to narrow your selection are just not there.

Perhaps Amazon’s failure to provide attributes of significant depth in many categories is due to product data problems – like Comparative Search Engines, a lot of data is provided by independent merchants. Whatever the reason, Amazon loses a fair chunk of my business – e.g. today I bought a set of toner cartridges for a color printer ($200) on another website (one I have never used before) because I wasn’t able to understand – or trust – the choices presented to me – and I wasn’t sure I had isolated all the relevant choices.

I’ll be posting more examples of Amazon’s pluses and minuses but, for now, the key takeaway is that while Amazon is definitely the 800–lb gorilla there’s plenty of room for savvy merchants to hold their own.

Our shift to Drupal is a bit painful right now. Posting to the blog is easy enough (famous last words!) but getting pages loaded is tiresome. We hired someone (thanks Pawan!) to get our HomePage working but had expected that we could take care of basic pages ourselves. Looks like we’re going to need some help for a while, especially as IRWD is in less than two weeks. Keeping our fingers crossed!

When you’re running a startup, there is never enough time to do everything you need to do. Blogging can easily get overlooked. But what better way is there of sharing your experience and expertise with the world. One thing that doesn’t help facilitate regular blogging, is the sloppy interfaces presented in Word Press and Drupal. Especially since the people who can contribute the most to a blog are not necessarily the system administrative type.

Desktop Blogging to the rescue! There are a couple very nice programs that allow you to create clean, elegant blog entries, and make the blogging experience much more enjoyable.

Windows Live Writer (FREE) – this is a very good desktop client for blogging. Once you have set it up, it is very easy to compose blogs, insert images, and post them to your site. You can even go back and edit them without ever having to login to your website.

BlogJet (30–day Trial; $40 to buy) – this appears very similar to Windows Live Writer but has some extra added power. We think this program may function well not only for blogging but also for creating content for our website (e.g. pages).

With that said, I’d also like to share my experience in setting one of these programs up to work with a blog. For blogging novices like me, it can be very difficult and frustrating to find information. Especially with something as dynamic as Drupal (an attribute-based content management system), with much power comes much responsibility. So for anyone who is having the same problem I had, here is a lead on how to set up a desktop blogging client. They are all similar, but I chose the free Windows Live Writer.

Setting Up Drupal for Windows Live Writer

For Administrator (i.e. if you haven’t set anything up)

1. Download the Windows Live Writer BlogAPI from Drupal.org and extract it into a folder (make sure the version you download is compatible with version of Drupal you have, and make sure you remember where you put the folder)

2. Install the module using a FTP Client like FileZilla.

a. Once you have installed FileZilla, run the program, and click File -> Site Manager, click New Site.

b. Add your website/blog URL under Host (e.g. findwatt.com), Servertype=FTP, then add the username and password given to you by your website hosting company.

c. Once you have connected to the FTP, navigate the Remote Site folder structure (on the right) to find the modules folder (/html/modules). Then navigate the local site (your computer) and find the folder named after your module (i.e. wlw_blogAPI). Select both folders (so they’re highlighted grey).

d. Right click on the wlw_blogapi folder and select Upload. Now you’ve uploaded the module to drupal.

e. Now go into your Drupal admin and enable the module. And your’e done with the setup.

 For User (i.e. once admin has set it up, here’s how to connect)

1. Download and Install Windows Live Writer (you may need to sign up for a Windows Live account first)

2. I can’t give any better instructions than this post (from the guy who wrote the module)

This is partly a test posting to see whether blogging is working properly on our new Drupal site – we have great hopes for Drupal, particularly when Drupal 7 is released as it’s reputedly nearly 100% focused on making Drupal easy for non-techies. This post is also to announce that we’ll be exhibiting at the Internet Retailing Web Design & Usability (IRWD) conference in Orlando February 15-17th. More on IRWD to come.

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Findability Find of the Week, a new blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the Faceted Navigation of 3Balls.com. 3Balls has done an excellent job managing the attributes of their products and presenting them in a way that is useful to the customer. The navigation of this site has many advantages over other sites we’ve seen, but for today we’re going to focus on two main points that have a huge impact on findability.

1) Thorough Attributes – Unlike sites that only allow filtering by Brand, Price, and/or Size, 3Balls has anywhere between four and twelve attributes per product category. I’m no golf expert (I can’t guarantee that they aren’t missing any relevant attributes!) but the available filters make it very easy to narrow down the results to a manageable number and find just the right product.

Example from 3Balls.com—the Wedges category contains 12 filters!

2) Well-Populated Attribute Values – One problem often found on sites with faceted navigation is insufficient population of attributes. A product filter that allows the customer to choose between “A” and “B” doesn’t function well when some “A” products are missing the attribute value “A”.

This is not a problem with 3Balls, as all products appear to have the appropriate attributes. For example, within 734 Wedges, the “By Hand” attribute shows 137 for Left Hand and 597 for Right Hand. These numbers correctly add up to the total number of 734 products, indicating that each product has been populated with either “Left Hand” or “Right Hand”.

Together, these two features make it easy for a customer to quickly and easily find exactly the product he is looking for, and to feel more confident in making a purchase because he can be certain that he has seen everything that meets his criteria. A shopping experience like this is almost enough to make me want to take up golf!

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!

The 3 key processes that determine whether your customers can find what they want

Have you ever been shopping in a grocery store, and one of the store employees politely asks, “Are you finding everything ok?” If you are like me and don’t know the layout of the store like the back of your hand, you take the opportunity to ask the clerk exactly where everything on your list is located. Otherwise you end up wandering up and down each aisle, looking at the shelves, hoping to find stuff. This is the basic concept behind findability: How easy is it to find what you are looking for? And in most grocery stores, I have found the findability to be very poor.

In his book “Ambient Findability” Peter Morville defines Findability, dictionary style:

find-a-bil-i-ty n

a. The quality of being locatable or navigable

b. The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate

c. The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval

On the web, and specifically for e-commerce sites, findability means how easy is it for a shopper to find the product they are looking for.

This is extremely well put, and I can’t say it more clearly. For e-retailers, having a website where the products are findable is critical to their ability to compete. If findability is poor, sales and customers are lost because…You Can’t Buy What You Can’t Find!

But how do you judge findability? There are three basic processes to be evaluated:

1. If you know what you want, can you find it? – This is called known-item-search, and appropriately, the search box is most often used. If I am looking for an 8 GB iPhone 3G, and I search using that exact phrase, do I get those results right away? Or are the first results something unexpected, like accessories for the phone? Or nothing at all?

2. If you have some idea of what you want, but do not know exactly, can you find it? –This is where findability is actually most difficult to achieve. You know you want a coffee maker, but which kind? Ideally you have some knowledge of coffee makers and which kind you prefer. But it may be you don’t have a clue. How well can you find the right coffee maker for your situation?

3. If you’re just browsing, will you easily discover something you want to buy? – In this situation, you are not focused on specific product type. But can you navigate through all the available choices? And to what extent can you refine your search.

This evaluation is far from academic. Findability has real business consequences. If you can find something easily, you have more time to decide whether to buy, and continue shopping for more. For the e-retailer and shopper alike, there is nothing worse than not being able to find the product they might buy. And worse, frustration in finding a product causes disillusion, preventing a transaction, and possibly losing a customer.

Will Evans, founder and Principal User Architect for Semantic Foundry, sums it up nicely, saying:

Increased findability leads to increased business results

• More people find what they’re looking for – faster – thus improving conversion rate
• Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Decreased customer service cost

Opportunities for targeted merchandising

• Up-selling based on selected facets (similar attributes might mean affinities in the customers mind
• Cross-selling based on selected facets
• Each facet selected is valuable customer data (these are attributes customers are saying they are interested in!)

Have you shopped on your own site lately? Try each of the 3 findability processes. Even with known-item search, we find that lots of sites have problems. If you start with only a one or two keyword search, are you presenting your customer with pages and pages of products with no way to filter other than brand and price? Are you forcing your customer to keep adding keywords to the search box before they can get down to a manageable number? Or worse, does your search end up with fewer results than customers would get if they navigated to the relevant subcategory (a common problem)?

This’ll give you a rough sense of your site’s findability. To start managing your site’s findability, use the Findability Evaluation Framework available in our Findability Review section to identify where you can get the biggest Findability boost with the least effort. Or sign up for a FREE Findability Review, and we’ll do the work for you.

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Findability Find of the Week, a new blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the Brand Filter on BabyAge.com.  BabyAge has implemented a great solution to the classic issue of how many facets too display.

Their brand filter contains a list of brands with checkboxes, allowing the customer to choose brands by clicking if they see what they want. However, if the customer wishes to avoid scrolling through pages of brands, there is a text box which filters the list of options when text is entered. For example, if a customer knows that the brand they want contains the word “baby” but cannot remember the exact name, they need only type in “baby” to get a filtered list.

This solution is well suited to customers’ needs—those who want a specific brand can easily zero in on it, those who don’t care about brand can easily skip the filter altogether (without having to scroll too far, as the large list of brands is nicely contained) and those who want to see all brands can scroll within the box to view the whole list.

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!