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Get Out of The Way of Your Customer!

This is a true story about a $300 million dollar button on a website. User Interface Engineering, which does usability studies on e-commerce sites, recently had a report about a client who they did some usability studies on. A major e-commerce retailer, this online store had the idea of installing a login feature just before the final step in the checkout process. After  you selected items from their store and went to checkout, you were prompted to either log into the site or register for a free account. The concept was that with an account, you could track your previous orders and make future buying easier. The web designers assumed that past customers returning to the site would know their login information, and the new users wouldn’t mind the extra steps of signing up an account, since they’d probably be returning to buy again in the future. These are very simple assumptions but wound up causing an extremely expensive mistake.

The study concluded that a substantial amount of people right on the cusp of purchasing a product declined to do so because of the registration process. In addition, many past customers had difficulty logging in as they did not remember their user names or passwords and didn’t want to wait for a response from the website telling them what it was. 45% of past customers actually had multiple logins with different passwords. While these factors were not a huge percentage of customers, it was enough to show a significant dent in the loss of business it created. For a company worth $25 billion, even a small dent in their revenues did amount to a significant amount of money? How significant? How about $300 million annually.

After doing this study, the UIE suggested replacing the mandatory registration portion of the checkout with a simple “Continue” button. They also changed the text to reflect that registration was not required but was a helpful option if you planned on returning to the site again in the future. The result? Sales went up by 45% immediately - $15 million in just the first month and $300 million in the first year, simply by adding a “continue” button.

So the lesson here is that so many times when it comes to website design we think about how it makes things more convenient for the designers and not so much for the customers. A great way around this is to have people beta test the website more effectively before having such a feature go live. I remember building a website about seven years ago. The client wanted to have the “buy now” button flash in red and yellow everywhere it appeared on the website. The thought was it would stand out and the customer would never be lost when it came time to place an order. When we beta tested the website, the testers all stated that the button was annoying and distracting when they were trying to read the product description adjacent to the flashing button. As such, they found it motivation enough to stop reading and click off the site. So a feature that was intended to get people to buy more frequently actually wound up driving them away.

So whenever working on your own website, be aware of the experience you have building it may not be the same experience your visitor has when they are on it. Sometimes we have to take off the “Designer” hat and put on the “Customer” hat when it comes to our own e-commerce website. Doing so may result in a much more positive result than you might think.