Increase conversion rate by reducing customer stress on your website

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.