How site usability helps extend the brand online
Usability helps build the brand on e-commerce sites—a simple concept, but implementing it is a multi-tiered challenge, says Lillian Vernon Corp. president Jonathan Shapiro. Shapiro will describe how Lillian Vernon is going about pushing its long-established catalog brand out onto its 4-year-old web site in a presentation at e-Tail 2004, “Building Upon A Foundation of Superior Usability By Infusing Your Overall Brand Into Your E-commerce Offering.” According to Shapiro, “Usability as we think of it, means making the site able to help customers accomplish their goals. The problem is you have many different users with many different goals.”
Matching customer goals with business goals and prioritizing them correctly is still only half the battle when it comes to enhancing the brand through better site usability. Executing on that match-up effectively requires testing, and lots of it—one reason a top requirement in the web site update Lillian Vernon, No. 65 in Internet Retailer Top 300 Guide to online retailers, will roll out this fall was improved testing ability behind the scenes. The site, currently in the redesign process, will build in testing functionality that allows merchandisers to easily conduct tests such as A/B splits, in a way that will be transparent to the site visitor.
“We’re rebuilding the site as a testing engine,” says Shapiro, as a complement to the testing Lillian Vernon has always done on in its catalog business. One further requirement beyond the right infrastructure to make testing successful is having the right expertise on board to do it, Shapiro adds. “To be statistically significant and useful for predicting what is going to happen, testing has to be designed, interpreted and executed well,” he says. “You need experts who know how to do that. If your marketing director doesn’t know the ABCs from an A/B split, you need some help.”
Shapiro will be speaking at 9:25 a.m. general session Tuesday.
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