New research: The SimpleUsability Online Experience Index for UK Fashion E-commerce sites

This article summarises our review of the clothing retail websites for Marks & Spencer, Hobbs, Karen Millen, French Connection, Boden, Oasis and Fat Face. Reviews were performed in the week of 10 March 2014. The aim is to highlight best practices and areas for improvement that can be applied by retailers. You will see from the Radar charts for the retailers that there are substantial differences in experience of each of the customer journey and overall.

Understanding, measuring and improving the customer experience is a pretty fundamental part of everything we do at SimpleUsability.

Whether we’re working on competitor or comparator testing at the start of a project, multi-platform testing across a number of devices, or an expert review, our research and the resulting recommendations help our clients to improve their customer experience and benefit from the associated commercial gains around…

Interview with Paul Cotton from K2uno on Tealeaf solutions

We recently interviewed Paul Cotton, Managing Director of K2uno who are an advanced Business partner of IBM, specialising in applying Tealeaf CEM solutions to optimise the customer experience. One of their solutions is aimed at improving online customer experiences, by providing companies with real-time video information on customer interaction and user journeys; increasing conversion rates, customer retention and ROI for many of its clients. Find out more from Paul's interview, how this type of approach is helping companies and his tips on improving the customer experiences.

Q. How can a solution such as Tealeaf improve online customer experiences.

Tealeaf improves online experience in a number of ways. Almost anyone who has transacted online can recite stories of frustration, where they weren’t able to do what they set out to do. Page errors, navigation issues, slow responses and payment failure are just a…

Design, Content or Brand .. is one more important than the other in (re)designing your website?

Website design can be an opinionated business. These opinions are sometimes informed, sometimes not. Occasionally the opinions are not necessarily to do with the design itself, but more to do with the politics within a business. Personally I am all for design of any nature to be stress tested by a client or the market. However, how many of us have made changes to a successful website design, just so we feel like we have been involved?. We also need to recognise that website design is a fluid process. We are dealing with an entity that is constantly evolving. This means that when creating a new website design, the Designer has to take into consideration multiple facets; including: is the website 'on brand' (or does it look…

Today I'm speaking at the Fusion Marketing Experience in Belgium today and looking forward to talks by Bryan Eisenberg (@TheGrok), Joost de Valk (@yoast) and Jeff Molander (@JeffreyMolander). I'll be liveblogging, first up is @GerryMcGovern...

Gerry McGovern on Top Tasks and the Long Neck

I enjoyed talking with Gerry last night, listening to the methods he uses on studies for companies with huge sites like the BBC, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft. He starts with a theme for today - don’t trust the design of your sites, your customer experiences, to “gut instinct or suits around a table with lattes”. The essence of the method is to identify around 100 main tasks on a site from researching site visitor behaviour by analysing search, analytics and interviews. Usually there’s around 100 and a single page survey is used to get a rating of these. Amazingly, just 4-6 top tasks get 25%…

What is an average bounce rate

Question: I wondered whether you might be able to point me in the direction of some info on web behaviour? We've recently been looking at “drop off” rates for some of our online content and seeing if we can compare it with external sites to help gauge whether the behaviours we are seeing could be considered as 'typical'. The metrics we've been looking at include time spent on a page (0-10, 10-20 seconds etc) and would like to compare to external websites such as BBC, YouTube, etc. Do you know how it is possible to obtain this data, or any external websites who may have it? We measure it, but have no external reference as to whether it is good, bad or indifferent. Nicola

July 2011 update

Google Analytics has just published a compilation of Average bounce rates - see the caveats later in my article about the dangers of comparing…