Usability & Conversion
Common misconception amongst those e-commerce firms that are new to usability is overarching expectation that usability is a panacea for all conversion problems they encounter. Shopping path throughput is down? More drop-offs on the credit card page? Call the usability man.
In my experience, ongoing usability effort will indeed improve your conversions / sales, but won't magically magnify it 3-fold. Here is why.
Taking online travel as example. Conversion (a percentage of folks who book out of those who visit the site, sometimes as low as 1%, sometimes as high as 5%) depends on a myriad of internal and external factors with usability kinks contributing only in minority proportion.
As per the pie above, in online travel, conversion is affected by:
internal factors:
- Usability - is it easy to use your site? Are there any show-stoppers inside your booking path?
- PPA = Product. Price. Availability - is your product good / cheap / available so users want to buy?
- Platform - Is your site available / fast enough, so that users don't have to go to competition?
- Brand - Do they trust your site? Does it look credible? Any of their friends booked with you?
- User Quality - Have they seen your site before? Where are they from (display, loyalty programs, adwords)? Are they in your target audience at all?
external factors:
- Competition - How much better / worse is your competition? Are they online / offline? Their products, prices, promos. It all matters due to price comparison engines and google at customers' disposal.
- Context - Is the market mature enough to sell your product online? Economic downturns, market trends, fashions, internet trust in general - all count here.
To sum it all up. Your usability project won't be a game-changer. Let's not look at usability as a once-off expense - hire a top-notch usability shop and get that smart looking 50p long usability recommendation, expecting a magic million dollar bonus in your next quarter P/L. It's time to embrace user experience full time and employ a person whose sole responsibility will be to research, improve and measure all usability aspects of your site on the ongoing basis.
Likely, short-term results of your first usability project might barely pay off the expense of hiring the right guy. Long term however, consistent usability approach combined with timely execution will not only improve conversion directly, but also improve it indirectly by positively affecting your brand, number of recommending customers or returning visits. In short: (Usability) patience wears away (conversion) stones.
4 comments
Dec 04, 2009
Michael Sliwinski said...
Very true. Usability is not everything, but it's so important!You actually made me aware of many usability issues in our web app and I'm glad we've worked many of these. Now it's time for KAIZEN - continuous improvement and making it even better.
I've scheduled each Monday morning with my developer to work on one usability improvement for Nozbe - this way we'll have at least one issue worked out a week and ultimately our app will be getting even better on a continuous basis... and hopefully it'll also have an impact on our revenue and conversion... and overall happiness of our users :-)
Dec 04, 2009
Maciek Saganowski said...
exactly mate. Consistency and kaizen are key to improving conversion via usability enhancements. Single project won't do wonders unless you follow through with ongoing improvements. Looking forward to more flavors on nozbe.com as per the roadmap :)