New Research - The SimpleUsability Online  Experience Index for the top 5 Mobile Phone Companies

This post summarises new research from SimpleUsability who reviewed the quality of customer experience delivered by 5 leading mobile networks / telecoms retailers: Three, EE, O2, Virgin and Vodafone. This builds on previous research covering online appliance experience and clothing retail experience.

Key findings from the research of telecommunications websites

Good brand positioning and OVPs, 'though navigation could be improved. Lengthy checkout processes, with a mix of poor and good information support. Good product selection filters. Most websites had a search function, though presentation could be improved. Persuasion, Emotion and Trust (PET) techniques were low - Proof and Trust shown by only two companies.

Methodology for researching the ecommerce websites

To score each site’s overall experience rating, a panel of expert UX professionals assessed the site in the context of a core user journey of browsing a new mobile phone.. The examiners rated…

Testing of over 900 Ecommerce sites shows how 'cleaner' designs can increase ecommerce sales

What can the fastest-growing eTailers teach us about visual design? Anyone involved in the design or marketing of ecommerce sites has had the discussion at some point: 'is this design too busy? Too cluttered?' As it turns out, it probably is. And you can probably make more money by cleaning it up – at least according to our latest research here at EyeQuant, a German neurotechnology company that specialises in quantitative user experience metrics. A classic debate put to rest by data To examine the role of visual clarity in user experience, the EyeQuant team took a sample of 960 ecommerce designs and showed them to 500 users in pairs, asking which design felt 'cleaner'. After collecting responses from several hundred participants, the team ranked every design in the study and used this data to train an artificial intelligence that can…

Examples and research showing why content marketing is now key for driving Ecommerce customer journeys

Ecommerce is constantly evolving alongside the development of new digital media and technologies, yet one aspect has not changed. That is, the importance of search intent in the buyer journey. Consumers continue to use search to find, research and buy the products that they want. However, though this basic fact may not be changing, the way search works is. Search algorithms and in particular those by Google are regularly updated to focus more on quality and relevance of content. So now ecommerce businesses have to think differently about content's position in the buyer journey. Long gone are the days of keyword density, link farms and ghost pages. Want your products to rank well for search? You need quality content.

The intersection of content marketing and ecommerce

How are ecommerce businesses using content marketing?  New research from Econsultancy…

What Makes Great Ecommerce Website Design? Part 2: The Category Page

In Part Two of my series of blog posts looking at the factors that help make different parts of an ecommerce websites more effective in experience, merchandising and SEO, I review examples of category pages. In Part 1 I looked at 5 Ecommerce home page best design practices. You can think of Category pages serving as the 'Departments' within your website like they do in a department store - the ladieswear department, childrens wear department and so on. These areas in a department store are typically demarcated by very visual merchandising, such as mannequins dressed in the types of clothes that you'd find in that department, visual posters/ signage showing branding or imagery depicting the section you are in - smiling children on posters indicating that you are in the childrens' section. These subtle visual prompts are often un-noticed yet serve to ensure that…

4 online appliance retailers rated for the best overall online experience across 150 mobile and desktop touchpoints on the customer journey

Simple Usablity recently reviewed the UX from 4 leading e-commerce sites (Currys, Argos, Appliances Online and Appliances Direct), to find out how they are focusing on the customer experience.  The companies were assessed across 120 touchpoints along the customer journey from homepage to checkout, and 30 touchpoints to rate their mobile experience.

PET Assessment - Persuasion, Emotion and Trust

Retailers were assessed on this and other criteria including social proof, salience and gamification. Appliances Online ranked the highest on 'Emotion',  Currys on 'Salience' (how they influence what visitors pay attention to and how they interpret the meaningfulness of the information) and Argos on 'Social Proof' (customer reviews and ratings).

Mobile Strategy

All three retailers, except Appliances Online were evaluated across 30…

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…