Retailers need to make sites easier to use, report says

E-commerce sites had the highest failure rate for task completion among four categories of web sites tested for usability in a recent study by digital marketing firm OneUpWeb Digital. 

The study asked consumer testers to complete a set of tasks, such as finding the cost of a custom business card on three online printing services sites. The web marketing firm found the e-commerce sites had a 45% task completion failure rate. By contrast, the task completion failure rate for similar assignments on three travel and hospitality sites was 31%, three university sites 28% and business-to-business sites 23%.

For the study, OneUpWeb defined failed tasks as those in which the user moved on to the next assigned task without first reaching a specified URL that indicated the user had completed the previous task successfully. Reaching this URL counted as a successful completion of the task, but the significance of the URL was known only to testers, not users. Therefore, users could indicate that they’d completed the task and were ready for the next task when, in fact, they had not actually finished the task successfully.

The task abandonment rate, which measured instances of testers clicking a button to deliberately elect not to complete a step, was only 8% for the online printing services sites, compared to 20% at the travel and hospitality sites, 10% at the university sites and 6% at the business-to-business sites tested.

OneUpWeb speculates that on the e-commerce sites some users moving through the tasks quickly saw enough familiar navigation to believe they’d completed the task and indicated they’d done so, without actually digging deep enough into the site to find the designated URL.

By contrast, the task abandonment rate was highest—20%—at travel and hospitality sites, suggesting that more users were simply giving up on tasks, perhaps due to factors such as unfamiliar navigation or heavy text density on the sites.

The study, conducted to illustrate a new web design and usability testing process recently developed by OneUpWeb, identified core elements defining site usability in the four industries.

E-commerce sites, the study report noted, face the particular challenge of balancing a warehouse of product information with transactional capability.

“Designing a user-friendly e-commerce site is challenging precisely because of what the site has to accomplish,” according to the report. “The site does double duty as a storefront and an inventory management system. But the site has to be designed first and foremost to handle the primary objective: sales.”

E-commerce sites can boost their usability by how they present content and by meeting consumers’ expectations of how a retail site should look and what features it should incorporate, the study says.  Specifically, it recommended retailers repeat key links that appear in top-of-the-page real estate elsewhere on the page, such as in a page footer or along the side to help site visitors more easily find what they’re looking for within the site.

The report also recommended that e-commerce sites use images selectively, noting that too many images can clutter pages and make it more difficult for users to locate what they are looking for. The study also says bigger is better for product images on e-commerce sites, with fewer, bigger images serving to reduce clutter and more effectively directing consumers’ attention.

The results were based on responses from 103 remote testers recruited by OneUpWeb.