A recent report from the Royal Mail reports that 82% of online shoppers said that free delivery would encourage their use of a website.

This makes sense, but before you rush out and start advertising ‘Free Delivery’ all over your website, it is important to look at how best to promote this.

When usability testing eCommerce websites we often observe users completely ignoring large ‘Free Delivery’ banner adverts, and still getting confused when they are looking for delivery information. This is due to banner blindness, where users discount anything that looks like an advert in the corner of their eye. So how do eRetailers combat this?

First, look at the user journeys to understand where in the process they will need information about free delivery. There are often multiple points in a process where your customer will ask themselves about delivery charges. This may differ on a variety of websites but typically this will include:

• Pricing – include ‘Free Delivery’ where ever you quote a price. This will remove the need for users to ask how much delivery will be
• Product detail page – explain that delivery is free when users are reading about a product and considering their purchase
• Delivery page – for users who are specifically looking for delivery information, ensure there is a dedicated page to reiterate that delivery is free

www.play.com provides ‘Free Delivery’ message with all pricing

The above tips will provide a starting point to encouraging your users to buy from you. However, observing your users interacting with your website continues to be the best way to establish where in the user journey the Free Delivery should be mentioned, and to establish what other barriers are a cause of cart abandonment for your users.

How well are you promoting Free Delivery, and do your users see it?

Related services: e-commerce usability & usability testing

Your website can attract a wide variety of visitors. Trying to appeal to them all can be troublesome and the results can leave you with more unhappy customers than happy ones.

When user profiling, there are two very distinct ways to go; methodical and thorough with a reasoned and structured analysis, which is our typical user profiling project, or ‘quick and dirty’.

In the agile, nimble world of the modern Web, we appreciate you don’t always have the time to do things perfectly so here are three steps to help you with the quick and dirty approach.

Step 1. Decide on who your customers are

Break down your users into five groups, based on what they need from your site. One way to do this is with an ad hoc meeting with your team. In the meeting explain what you want, without explaining why until the end, this way you get original thinking and not prepared, canned answers.

We challenged our client Bob Barbour at the MS Society to do this. He set up a ‘flash’ meeting – putting it out as a desperate appeal for help at very short notice. He got great results as the attendees had no time to ‘over think’ the exercise and so didn’t try to serve their own objective by pushing one user group over another.

Don’t underestimate the challenge of only coming up with five user groups, it will be hard, but it is important to set a limit to help you focus. If you come up with too many groups, look at how you can merge some together.

Step 2. Come up with questions for each group

Now come up with questions for each group that they are likely to ask when looking at your website. Make sure the questions are actionable, i.e. “Is this company reputable?” Then, focus on what are the most important questions for that user group.

Choose the top three priority questions for each user group, and focus on these. For example, if we did this for our website, it might look something like this:

Group 1 – Asked to investigate usability suppliers by their boss
1.    Do they appear trustworthy and competent?
2.    What is different about their approach?
3.    How much will it cost?

Group 2 – Understand more about usability testing
1.     What is usability testing?
2.    What else should I consider?
3.    Can I do it myself?

Step 3. Focus on the high priority users

From your five groups, select the two most important, as a primary and secondary group. These should be your number one business priority to serve, i.e. the users that will lead to you reaching your business goals for the site.

Next Steps

After completing your quick and dirty approach to user profiling, you will have a better idea of who your essential customers are, what they need and where to focus your efforts on your website to help your users.

We will discuss how to use the profiles that you have created in a future article, but for the time being you can use your new user profiles to focus your website planning on addressing user needs instead of internal guesses.

What methods have you used to get a better picture of your users?

Related service:  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

I paid for a train ticket over the counter yesterday. As I completed the transaction I nearly walked off leaving my Debit card in the PIN machine. As I turned back to the machine to retrieve the card the chap behind the counter said something along the lines of, “That was lucky. We’ve already had three people leave their cards here this morning.”

Three people, this morning, have walked away leaving their card in the machine. Can you imagine arriving for a day in London and realising you’ve left your Debit card somewhere? Pretty stressful huh?

If your customers are suffering – take action

So having already experienced people leaving their cards, would it not be courteous to remind customers to remove their cards after the transaction?

Since Chip & PIN, all organisations have had to invest heavily in installing new equipment to cater to the new technology. However, I can’t help but ask myself if some of this technology either hasn’t been thought through properly, or is not being used properly.

Technology shouldn’t create customer experience issues

If the staff working behind a counter are unable to see the Chip & PIN machine it would be useful for their screen to inform them that the card has not been removed. They can then prompt the customer. Like most ‘simple’ fixes, it becomes less simple to fix once the technology is complete.

If the full customer journey and scenarios are planned and mapped out prior to build, these minor details will be catered for. And if customers are introduced to the project early, to test a prototype, the barriers will be highlight and dealt with before these ‘simple’ issues become costly fixes.

Do you involve customers in your project process early enough?

Related services: Customer Journey Mapping and Usability Evaluation & Testing