In this article:
Building Web Sites With Depth
1. The Web encourages user freedom.
2. Physical stores have their own problems too.
3. Users are only a click away from leaving.
4. The good and the bad of searching on the Web.
5. Make your site and products easier to find.
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Is the Web really the ultimate customer-empowering environment?
The Web as a whole is empowering, because users have the option to click over to the competition at the slightest whim. So why do sites so often leave users feeling powerless?
The Web increases accessibility and defies geographical barriers. But e-commerce sites often decrease accessibility and erect more barriers than you'd walk past in a store.
The Web is all about choice; the range of places available for users to transact business is astounding, the options almost endless. Individual Web sites, on the other hand, often don't give customers the flexibility that a physical store provides. Customers in physical stores have more power than customers on e-commerce Web sites. Customers in physical stores can approach an expert either a salesperson or a fellow shopper and ask questions, explain their problems, and get recommendations. If the customer wants to compare similar items that the store offers, the customer can view the items side-by-side (size permitting).
The Web encourages user freedom.
Viewed overall, the Web encourages unparalleled user freedom with millions of sites to choose from. In recent user studies, we've found that people sometimes browse multiple sites in parallel for ultimate control over where to shop and when to leave a site that's too difficult to use. At the same time, users are often powerless to choose the details of their destiny on individual sites. They can leave any time, but if they stay, they're locked into the site's way of doing things.
The contrast to physical stores is great: Stores empower users by letting them change tactics if something isn't working for them. If you get a lousy salesperson in a large store, you can look for a different one. Or, if the store map doesn't help you find the department you need, you can ask a salesperson or a fellow customer for help. If the item you need isn't available, good salespeople will help you locate items at other stores or in other departments, and have the items sent to you directly. Good stores know that it's not enough for the store to look nice it must act nice as well, and support the total customer experience, including location, staffing, returns, payments, sales, and so on. E-commerce sites focus far too often on superficial niceties, without investing in their customers' underlying needs.
Web sites that provide better user experiences empower their consumers to reap the benefits of the Web, but don't let them lose the power and flexibility they'd have in a physical store. In other words, when customers have the options they want, customers have power. Unfortunately, most Web sites don't provide a user experience that feels like shopping instead it feels like searching, which isn't the users' goal. Users want to shop or find information in a way that seems natural to them, not search or struggle using "Web tools and features" that offer inflexible ways to do and find things. Worse, these tools are often built without any regard for how real users think, group things, name things, or approach their problems.
Physical stores have their own problems too.
Physical stores aren't perfect far from it. Frustration abounds in physical stores, from parking, crowds, annoying salespeople, seeing the same thing for a better price in the next store, and products being out of stock.
Shopping in the real world leaves people fairly powerless in the bigger picture. Sure, you can walk out of one store and drive to another, but it's a hassle to do so. And what are the chances that the next store will be any better, and that you won't have to drive to the neighboring town if you're still not satisfied? Thus, people have a great incentive to shop at the first place they visit.
Users are only a click away from leaving.
Whether at a Web store or a real store, when users don't get what they want, they leave. But they leave more readily on the Web. In a recent e-commerce study the most common factor that stopped users from buying on a site was that they couldn't find the item they were looking for. And when they used a site's search function to try to find items, the failure rate was even higher because users couldn't find what they wanted.
With a web page, you have the 'mechanics' of getting the HTML right to provide the 'function' of getting the message across. The 'style' provides a more subliminal communication, but it's just as important because it can reinforce, or contradict what you are saying. It is the 'tone-of-voice' of the message.
The good and the bad of searching on the Web.
Here's an area of e-commerce design that could exceed the capabilities of real people in physical stores, in terms of speed, accessibility, and comprehensiveness. In reality, search is one of the most common, and one of the least successful ways that users look for things on the Web. Search is often as bad as the worst salesperson or customer service representative.
And unlike dealing with a real person, customers can't ask to speak to search's manager, although we've often seen users go to outside search engines such as Google when they have no success using a site's own search engine. From previous experience, users know that Google will find good answers, so they waste no time struggling with an internal search engine that returns junk hits.
Make your site and products easier to find.
Search for customer needs, not just your product line. Make sure your search engine addresses customers' nonproduct needs, such as customer service. In physical stores, good customer service representatives and salespeople can easily help people find out where and how to check the gift registry, return items, or make payments. In contrast, none of the Web sites we tested appeared to support nonproduct searches for items like "payment," "price protection," and "returns." This was more than an annoyance; the user who entered "payment" had selected an item and couldn't get past the product page to check out. The search engine returned a "No products found" message. It's hard to imagine how bad a brick-and-mortar store would have to be to tell a customer looking for the checkout counter, "Sorry, we don't carry those..."
Tell customers what you don't have. A salesperson in a brick-and-mortar store generally tells you if the store doesn't carry what you're looking for. Search engines, on the other hand, often tell you nothing in this situation. When a search returns no hits, users struggle to understand what it means. Does the site not have the item? Is it called something else? Did you misspell the name? Think of the horror of a salesperson staring dumbly as you repeatedly ask for an item using different names, vocal inflections, anything to get your point across.
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