Value of experiments in online commerce (opinion)

I just wrote a new article about experiments and online stores and I just wanted to share it with you, hope you like it.

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I have written several times about the need to adapt online commerce and online commerce solutions to the users’ needs. There is still a question: how do we realize what the online stores customers need?

Knowing that user experience can greatly influence purchasing decisions I think we should not ignore this.

This article tries to answer this question: how do we realize what the online stores customers need?

What should be improved?
User experience starts when a visitor reaches a page on your online store. This page is not always front page of the site. The first aspect to be improved is this page, which starts a user’s visit. Remember: this page is not necessarily the index page of your online store.

We are in the moment when a new visitor entered the online store. He now needs to go as fast and as easy as possible for products that interested him, those that are relevant to him. We must improve, then, the path from first page of his visit to the page he wants to see.

When the user has reached the product or products he’s interested in there are still two aspects that need to be improved:

• the path from initiating an order to ending the order
• the registration process of a new user

Generally, these are the directions where we need to look when we want to improve the user experience on an online store. How we do this is, however, another story.

How to find out what are the users desires?
There are several ways in which we can find out what they want.
We can do feedback forms, we can do surveys, we can do a contest to stimulate feedback but we can also do experiments with the online store.

I think that any way of collecting feedback we use, if we let the user decide what information he will provide, we can never be sure that we have real and relevant information available. Why do I believe this? Primarily because when a user sends us his feedback, being aware of that, he will provide us with subjective information. Second: this sort of collecting feedback generates reactions from extreme situations, the very happy and very unhappy people, but we are interested in an objective opinion of the majority of an average user.

We remain, however, with the experiments that we can run a tool that can help us find out what they want and we can be almost sure that the user provided objective and relevant information.

Note: a subjective opinion of a direct feedback from the user means that the information provided is different from the actual experience of that user.

What is an experiment with an online store?
An experiment on an online store is not an easy process but I think the results worth it.
A simplistic description of an experiment should be: modify sections of the store and study what happens, how users react and how the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) changes.

What are the steps necessary to make an experiment:

• identify the area where we want to do the experiment: it is better to choose one area at a time in which to do an experiment
• define what will be affected by the experiment: if we want to play with the product listing page and run some experiments on the product filters, change how it works and how it looks or their position then we write that down, change it and then look for the results.
• define a time and users interval when to run the experiment: the experiment can run several hours, several minutes or even several days, well, we can define and if it will run for all users or only for part of them.

Now you only have to implement your experiment and to measure the results.

 

An interesting read.

I agree that surveys and other forms of voluntary feedback are likely to give skewed results. It's better to depend on split testing, and profiling the user experience.

Look for any brick-walls and bottlenecks that the user is likely to encounter on a site, as these are often the easiest to find (and possibly fix), and they can account for the bulk of the visitor bounces from a site.

Look for any confusing elements on the site. Is the user getting all the information that they need? Are you giving them what they need on the site to make use of that information? Bear in mind that your visitors will have a wide range of experience with both the Internet, and with whatever functionality your site has, so keep it simple and obvious.

Ensure that the user experience from the point where they encounter your site, to the point where they meet whatever conversion goal you have (make a purchase, etc), is a smooth and easy experience. The more you make them work to meet that conversion goal, the less likely they are to complete that goal.

 

How much diversification of product categories is too much? Can this result in dup content issues if SE's index sort-by results pages, etc.., Or does it benefit the site as multiple pages?