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
Typically, 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 simplify 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 experiences 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 experiences 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.
