Jacob Nielsen writes in his latest column that eBay’s recent earnings increased because of better usability.
eBay reported record profits for Q1. This despite the fact that the number of auction LISTINGS only increased by 2%. However, merchandise SOLD increased by 14%.
In presenting the record numbers, the CEO, Meg Whitman, said that “the company had been benefiting from changes in the user experience that had increased the number of auctions leading to sales” (as quoted in The New York Times, April 19).
This is a great example of the benefits of usability for e-commerce: income comes from multiplying the amount of use with the conversion rate. The more you improve the user experience of finding products, researching them, and buying them, the higher your conversion rate.
Advertising is important, but it only brings customers to the site. A good user experience is what convinces them to stay there. Careful usability testing and a minimum of user annoyances is at least equally important. Usability affects whether the customer makes a purchase or clicks off to another site.
In eBay’s case, user experience is so important for profits that it’s one of the main things the CEO mentions to the financial press in presenting the quarterly results. eBay has a particularly competent user experience department, but smaller companies usually find that a smaller usability effort can increase their financial performance materially. Your first usability test will uncover a gold mine of low-hanging fruit, to mix metaphors.
Good design isn’t just pretty, it’s also good for business.
First, the enthusiasts: following is a video panel discussion among representatives of Second Life, MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn (a Commonwealth Club event, via ForaTV). According to them the value of online social networks is immeasurable. No-one blinked when Robin Harper from SecondLife admitted that their power-users average 84 hours a week online, and have absolutely no “First Life”.
And now, the detractors. Since the Kathy Sierra scandal, the Web 2.0 community has started talking about its dark side, albeit hesitantly. Is anonymity really that great? Are we abusing the democratic promise of the Internet by engaging in cowardly flaming wars under pseudonyms? Can you really trust information that is unedited and unattributed? Are people spending too much line creating online personas and online friendships, thereby forgetting how to connect as a real person, face to face?
The infinite desire for personal attention is driving the hottest new part of the Internet economy–social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, MTV Flux, and Bebo. As shrines for the cult of self broadcasting, these sites have become tabula rasas of our individual desires and identities. They claim to be all about “social networking” with others, but in reality they exist so that we can advertise ourselves: everything from our favorite books and movies, to photos from our summer vacations, to “testimonials” praising our more winsome qualities or recapping our latest drunken exploits.
It’s important to remember: just because you have 524 online friends (or colleagues) doesn’t mean they really know you or can vouch for you (or would show up with jumper cables if your car stalled at midnight in the rain).
I got a sneak peek at the Web 2.0 Expo this week by signing up for the free Expo-only pass. It’s fun to see a web event in person, since so much of what’s going on in web culture happens with one person sitting in front of a computer screen. In fact, it was a nice relief to just sit and listen to people talk without looking at a computer screen for a whole day! In part this was forced on me by the very low-fi wireless connection, but it’s still good training to just listen instead of popping open a new Firefox tab every three minutes.
The expo-only ID — the yellow badge announcing that “I didn’t pay to be here” — only allowed access to the “Products and Services” track, which was basically a bunch of pitches that were not interesting to me. So, I opted for the “un-conference” going on in the hallways outside the conference rooms — the Web 2.Open. These sessions were quite interesting and much more intimate than the larger audience-of-hundreds format. In particular I enjoyed Nicole Simon’s talk on a European perspective on Web 2.0, and a roundtable discussion on usability issues led by Chris Cole of Human Factors.
As far as the rest of the conference goes, I heard from other attendees that some of it was quite good. If anyone is interested in what was presented, LukeW has posted a very generous collection of notes from some of the sessions.
I usually try to avoid falling in love with shiny new web effects, but with Lightbox I couldn’t help it. I hope this effect doesn’t get overused too soon, because I really like it.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking for a nice-looking, easy to use, user-friendly slideshow script. I haven’t found much until now–Lightbox has it all. It’s based on the prototype framework and Scriptaculous AJAX effects library, but you don’t even have to know that to implement it.
Upload a small set of files to your webserver (.js files, a .css file, and some images). Files are here.
Anywhere in the page, add 4 lines of code that reference the three Javascript files and one CSS file.
Add a thumbnail image to your web page. Link this image to a larger version. Inside the anchor tag, add the following:
rel=”lightbox”
For an image series, add the following to the anchor tag for each image in the series:
rel=”lightbox[name-of-series]”
Each image should have the same series name. When the viewer holds the mouse over the image, a navigation button will appear (Previous on left, Next on right).
In the past week I’ve come across two useful reviews of best practices for designing web forms. The first is from LukeW’s Functioning Form–he writes about the pros and cons of different label placement options (top-aligned, right-aligned, left-aligned). He’s posted about the topic in detail before, but this recent post offers a handy summary of the issues to consider. Print it and hang it on your wall. For lots more detail, scan the pdf presentation.
As the question of top, right, or left aligned form labels comes up often for designers, here’s a short overview of the pros and cons of each method. For illustrated examples and more details, take a look at the full document: Best Practices for Web Form Design (3.9 MB PDF).
Another recent article related to web forms addresses instructional text in the user interface. Embedded user assistance can quickly become more complicated than you might think. Too much assistance clutters the screen, but if you hide the form field explanations under tooltips, your users might never see them.
Mike Hughes offers up the compelling idea that contrary to the logic of flow, instructions should appear below the form element rather than above it. When completing a form on the web, people tend to go straight to the action–so if the help text comes first, they skip over it:
Users skip static elements, such as instructional text, because they focus immediately on downstream actionable objects. Effective user assistance design accommodates users’ natural workflows by providing instruction immediately beside or following interactive elements that constitute points of need for more information.
Now that average Internet users are more accustomed to interacting with web forms, they have higher expectations for usability. Written best practices like those above help to make these expectations explicit, so we can better understand what makes a form easy vs. annoying.
