Category Archive: Web Usability

Dell’s direct marketing has always been impressive, but this recent full page branding ad in the New Yorker left me befuddled.

Site search is a conversation, a chance to listen to your customer and respond. Tune it up, and it has the potential to be one of the most ROI-positive investments you’ll make in your site. Is your site search providing maximum return?

Ever wondered how Google decides questions ranging from how many results to serve on a page, to the amount of whitespace with which to pad the logo and the most effective color with which to tint the sponsored link box at the top of the page?

Embracing design and usability conventions is absolutely foundational — but just 1 critical dimension of sites that sell effectively. What else matters?

Your current nav and prodcat categories make good sense to you. Have you considered if a different categorization might make more sense to your users?

Wondering if your site visitors are satisfied and how you can help them? We’re fans of Avinash’s 3 question primary purpose survey. A new free tool makes it easier to ask these questions on your own site.

Providing searchers what they really want also gets retailers what they really want: more sales.

Be unique in your merchandising and value proposition, not on where you put your site search box. Testing and usability labs show that conversion suffers when users can’t find site elements where they expect them to be.

Don’t choose a e-commerce platform; first, choose the type of platform, then choose the right platform of that type.

I recorded my NEMOA presentation and posted video.

I’ll be speaking at the Shop.org Marketing Workshop in Scottsdale, April 7 — 9.

Is your site clueless about relationships? Take a look at your sign-up processes and embrace drip irrigation marketing.

It’s taken a few more days than expected, but I’m just about dug out from the Internet Retailer Web Design ‘08 show. The most interesting takeaway from this trip: retailers aren’t yet testing their sites.

Strange controls on a fridge have little impact. It just takes me an extra minute or so to adjust it so it stops freezing the lettuce in the back of crisper. For a retail site, there’s no similar level of commitment. Design oddities, poorly-labeled buttons, and counter-intuitive shopping processes lead directly to abandons, brand damage, and lost sales.

Because they overcome the typical (and non-trivial) challenges with such panache, it’s worth your time to check out to the great “runway videos” on IsabellaOliver.com.

I’m looking forward to presenting at Internet Retailer’s new Web Design Conference, January 30- February 1, in sunny Miami.

Jos. A. Bank’s marketing e-mails work. But each time I get to the site, basic problems with site design and usability prevent me from ordering online.

No matter what size the online retail outfit, error handling should always be clear, easy, and friendly.

If you aren’t yet using multivariate testing to increase your site conversion, you should.

Some thoughts on migrating our corporate site to Wordpress, along with some code snippets.

We report on our progress porting our site to WordPress.

When Facebook makes big changes that affect their users, do they test first?

Whether your next release is a nifty widget or a workmanlike Holiday Gifts page you’ll probably want to take a look at Google’s Best Practices for Social Design.

People are the intelligent, irrational, distracted and determined folks your site needs to serve for your business to succeed. Web Analytics 2.0 is all about people.

It was great to share ideas with the smart interesting folks on the OMW online merchandising panel in San Francisco last week. I’ve jotted down a few highlights from the session.