Asking people what they think about your website can be a big mistake. Initially the opinions from the people you respect or from your customers appear to be really useful until you start to see that few people agree and most opinions contradict each other.

It is important to remember that getting people’s opinions do not reflect reality. Ultimately what people say they do, what they say they like or dislike, or what they say will influence them may not be true when they’re actually sat in front of a website using it to solve a problem. In our research with users, we’ve seen many people tell us they only use websites in a certain way, only to see them completely contradict themselves when they come to use a websites to complete a task. Often what influences us is not processed at a conscious level, so as humans we can be quite unreliable when predicting future behaviour or explaining our previous behaviour.

If you want to know how to improve your website there is no substitute for seeing real customers using your site. And when it comes to improving your website, focus on the logical factors rather than the emotive opinions.

There are of course times when you don’t ask for opinions but you receive feedback from friends, colleagues, customers, and peers. When you receive an opinion or comment about your site try not to engage with it emotionally, instead look at whether it is positive or negative and whether the opinion has valid reasons or justifications.

To help, use our categories below to determine what to do with any feedback you receive about your website:

Positive comment with no justification – This is the type of opinion you get from your Mum. They are saying nice things but it’s not anything meaningful to help you improve your website

Positive comment with good justification – This is useful. Think of what actions you have taken on the site to lead to this opinion and consider how you can maintain and transfer it to other areas of the site

Negative comment with good justification – This is useful. Think of what the likely causes are for this comment and investigate it further. If you receive similar comments over time start looking at your site analytics for possible trends and tell the person responsible for user experience to include this in the next usability test.

Negative comment with no justification – This is the type of comment you might get from someone who wants a reaction out of you. Typically this comes from a negative frame of mind and is unhelpful.

Opinions about your website are rarely helpful in helping you make improvements. When you do receive comments take time to strip them of their emotion and consider if they have real validity. Only when you have a number of comments highlighting a theme should you consider investigating further.

How do you deal with opinions about your website?

Nicole Cook from ShopStyle recently approached us for a review of their iPhone app. Following previous user feedback they made enhancements to the app, so we thought this was a great opportunity to kick off some more regular reviews of mobile apps on our blog. Let us know if you’d like your app reviewed.

We’ve put this review together following usability testing with a mix of regular iPhone app users and novice iPhone app users, as well as an expert user experience audit.

What is ShopStyle?

ShopStyle is an application which pulls together a number of different retailers into one place, allowing users to search and browse products on one app rather than visiting different apps or websites. Users can refine their searches to see all the products from the retailers signed up to the service, saving time and effort visiting different stores. Once a product is found, users are taken to the retailer’s site to complete their purchase.

The Good

• Saves users time searching through different retail sites for products
• Good categorisation of products
• Users can quickly mark an item as a ‘favourite’ to build a list of items they can look at in more detail later while they browse
• Users can discover products from brands and websites they may not have heard of or would not have found on the web
• Very visual way to browse through products which supports users high street shopping behaviour of flicking through clothes racks
• Refine options show how many items match the search criteria

The Bad

• Loading times can be slow as the app downloads lots of images in one go
• Even when users have refined their search criteria, there can still be a lot of items to scroll through.
• Some of the prices in the app are not accurate when clicking through to the website
• Prices are excluding delivery so it’s difficult for users to get an accurate view of how much they are likely to spend, instead users have to visit the website and find delivery costs and returns policy information
• When scrolling through a number of items it is difficult for users to tell how many more items are left as there is no scroll bar
• Refining options can be a little clunky if users want to refine a number of different items at once
• Accessing product information is a little unclear
• Some product images include model shots and other don’t which can give users a slightly disjointed experience

Our Top 3 Usability Improvements

• Limit the number of images loaded at one time -  Because the app is so image heavy, it can take a while to download all the images when users are on the move.  Flickr deals with this by downloading 40 thumbnails and then users can ‘load 40 more’ which allows the application to load a smaller number of images quickly

• Give users more control over filtering and sorting by price – Most users are price conscious and therefore rely upon price filters when searching for suitable products. With ShopStyle, users are forced to select a predefined price category when refining by price. Users however, want to search between their own minimum and maximum criteria e.g. John is willing to spend between £45 and £60 on a pair of jeans but has to search through a selection of jeans priced from £25 to £100. In addition, users need the ability to sort the results returned. We feel that allowing users to sort by price would be very useful for users.

• Improve button placement - When users wanted to refine their searches by more than one criteria users tended to select the filter, then click ‘Done’, which took them back to the products listing. They would then realise they needed to go back to ‘Refine’ to add another criteria. We feel that this problem could be solved by improving  button placement and labels. Bringing the two options closer together and labelling them ‘Refine more’ & ‘Done’.

Other Usability Improvements

• Add a scroll bar to searches
• Improve navigation options to make it clearer how to move left and right, and how to see product information
• Add a feature to allow users to compare details of the items listed in their ‘favourites’
• Allow users to save their personal preferences such as their shoe size, waist size etc. to provide personalised searches
• Add user ratings to searches and encourage users to add their own ratings to products
• Allow users to filter results by stores offering free delivery

Conclusion

Overall, we found the ShopStyle app offered users a good experience and users found the app to be extremely useful to them. The app does have some usability issues but none are showstoppers. Despite this, we feel that the improvements we recommend above will make significant enhancements to the overall experience and will become more important as more and more retailers sign up to ShopStyle. We look forward to seeing the improved version

Do you have an app you’d like us to review?

Related services: Usability testing & user experience audit

We’ve spoken to three different companies in the past couple of weeks who are all recruiting a ‘UX practitioner’.  Yet when we asked what they were looking  for, we found that each of them is looking for a different role. So we started to question the value of the term User Experience (UX) which seems to have become an over-used label to refer to everything from design, to internet marketing.

As a term, user experience is too broad and lacks clear definition. In fact, there is no agreed definition of what user experience is even within the UX community. There are some excellent examples of people trying to explain what user experience is and what it is not , but in terms of a role within an organisation it seems too broad to be useful because everyone contributes and a user experience practitioner can’t control every aspect of a site.

Before the term ‘user experience’ rose to popularity, the web industry relied upon terms such as information architecture, interaction design, and usability testing. They may not be as sexy or marketable as user experience, but they provide a much more structured way to consider roles and responsibilities for an organisation keen to improve users’ experience. Let’s look at each in turn:

Information Architecture
The origins of Information architecture lie in library sciences and is defined as “the art and science of organising and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability” by the IA institute

Typically, an information architect will help you to restructure, categorise and label information into a structure users will find easy to understand. A better way to explain it is provided by Christina Wodke:  “You know when you’re on a website and you see a bunch of navigation choices to click on? I’m the one who decided what the choices are, what they are called and where they take you when you click”

Interaction Design
Interaction design comes from the academic discipline of Human Computer Interaction. The IxDA provide the following definition: “Interaction design defines the structure and behaviors of interactive products and services and user interactions with those products and services”.

An interaction designer works out what the user goals is, and then decides what tools users need achieve their goal as quickly and easily as possible. This is explained further by Bill Verplank in a Video on YouTube

Usability Testing
Usability Testing or Usability Engineering  “is a discipline that provides structured methods for achieving usability in user interface design during product development” according to Deborah Mayhew in her excellent book The Usability Engineering Lifecycle

Usability Engineering also has its roots in Human-Computer Interaction and is a critical tool in ensuring a website meets the needs and expectations of its users. According to Jakob Neilsen, usability testing has three core activities “get representative customers, ask them to perform realistic tasks, and shut up and let them do the talking”

So, before you recruit a UX practitioner or ask for help with user experience take a moment to consider what type of help you are seeking and which discipline this would fall into. Bear in mind that there are lots of organisations like us who can provide all three services, but when recruiting or searching for a freelancer bear in mind that a good usability engineer isn’t necessarily a good interaction designer, and a good information architect won’t necessarily know how to design, facilitate and interpret usability research.

Related services: Usability testing, and User journey design

We were interested to see that a study of the UK’s top 40 online retail websites found that customer satisfaction is increasing year on year. Compared with US however, we were disappointed to find that UK sites still lag behind our US counterparts by 10%.

The study measured four key elements that the research company, Foresee, believes affects customer satisfaction: Merchandise, Functionality, Content, and Price. The study claims that functionality enhancements provide less of an ROI that merchandise and price improvements.

What, no usability?

The functionality aspect of this study does include the usefulness of functionality, but fails to include the usability of a website. In our experience, the right price for the right product is very important, but if users fund it difficult or frustrating during their user journey they will often revert back to Google to find an easier to use competitor offering.

The research is interesting and useful but usability is critical in the success of eCommerce sites and has not been considered in this study.

Usability is critical

The report advises online retailers to increase customer satisfaction by being aware of how changing specific elements of their websites will or will not impact customer satisfaction.

Observational research with the target audience is an excellent way of understanding what enhancements will and will not improve the user journey. Usability testing will help online retailers to understand where the issues are in the user journey, and then review the success of any enhancements that fall out of the research.

Does your website produce excellent customer satisfaction?

For many in the retail industry a regular shop walkthrough is an essential part of the manager’s role to ensure the environment is clean, the products are in the right places, and the shelves are stocked. Do you do the same checks on your website?

Your website is just like a retailer’s shop floor, it’s your front of house. How much time do you spend reviewing your website in a week? How often do your staff, or other team members, spend on the website every week? Ask them. You may be shocked to find that no-one is regularly checking the site. What are you waiting for? Customers to complain? Sales to drop? Traffic to plummet?

Stop waiting and start implementing a set of regular and very simple tasks to ensure that your site is checked on a weekly basis. Websites grow organically and although there’s no substitute for regular usability testing, there are methods you and your team can do adopt to keep a check on your site to ensure usability issues don’t develop as the site grows. After we work with a client to improve the usability of their website we provide them with a checklist to use which helps them maintain usability, you can download it here for free.

Download our Weekly Usability Checklist for you and your team to maintain good usability on your site. Feel free to pass it on to colleagues

Some of these may seem overly simplistic, but many companies are not carrying out these fundamental checks on a regular basis. If you and your staff were to spend 10 minutes a day or an hour a week just running through some of these simple checks you can be confident that you are keeping your front of house in check and giving your site visitors no encouragement to go back to Google to visit your competitors

Are you keeping your site in check?

Related services: Usability testing, and User experience audit