4 December 2006
Transcript of BBC Radio Lincolnshire interview
William - 10 to 7 and it's William Wright on drive time on BBC Radio Lincolnshire. So, how many times have you been sitting at your computer, browsing the Internet only to find yourself going around in circles, trying to do something, that on the face of it, on a website should be pretty simple? Some of these websites just don't seem to be logical do they?
Ah! Well, don't worry, it's not just you. According to web usability consultants Webcredible, some sites are really un-user-friendly. They've been looking at the web presence of 20 of the countries' high street stores, which is a great thing to do, just in time for Christmas because lots of people will be buying online this Christmas and from Webcredible, Trenton Moss is with us on the programme. Ah. Evening.
Trenton - Ah hi William
William - Just to explain this, Webcredible is a what, a web usability consultancy, you look at how usable website are?
Trenton - Ah! Yes, that's basically it. So we work with companies like T-Mobile, Norwich Union and um basically help them improve the user experience on the site so it's helping them to achieve their goals, which for these guys is to sell more products and make more money.
William - Yeah, and sometimes you'd think that would be really simple, but you do get lost on some sites and you end up in one area and you can't get back to the bit you think you should be able to get back to on that page.
So what have you been doing for this survey?
Trenton - Well basically we've been looking at 20 websites of some of the leading UK retailers in the UK like Argos and Boots, Woolworths, and we've been evaluating those websites against 20 top usability guidelines for e-commerce sites. So, basically looking at how easy it is to find products, when you get to a product is it easy to add it to the basket, and is it easy and intuitive to checkout and actually buy the product?
William - Ah, OK, so what did you find? Who were some of the bad sites?
Trenton - Ah! The bad. OK, let's start bad then. Clinton cards were very poor they only scored 25% in total, which is obviously quite a low score. But although I guess you could perhaps forgive them for that because the kind of products that Clinton Cards sell are very low value and perhaps, you know, their website isn't as important to them as a shop would be.
But second bottom with a score of just 31% is Top Shop, which for me is not that excusable. Top Shop should be selling millions and millions of products online if they had a decent online presence.
William - Well yeah, so let's just make that clear again, you think that if they had a fantastic site and they were scoring 100% in usability from you, their sales would be much more than they are now?
Trenton - Oh! Absolutely. There's been studies done in the past that have shown that a usability redesign can increase the sales rate by 100%, so literally doubling the amount of sales that you complete. I mean Top Shop's website didn't even have a search function on it. How are you supposed to find a product if you can't search for it?
William - You've got to go and search for it haven't you. You've got to be able to search for it. Who else did you look at?
Trenton - Um, we looked at well some of the guys near the top, Marks & Spencer, Early Learning Centre, Mothercare, they did extremely well generally speaking with scores in the 70's and 80's for Marks and Spencers. So, these guys yeah made it easy for users to find products.
Generally speaking when you go to website, users either want to search for the product or they want to browse for a product. So, searching means obviously running a search and browsing means you don't really want to run a search, you want to click on things. So you click on categories and sub-categories hoping to find the product that you want to find.
William - And what will the user do? Will the user persevere if they can't get what they want, or will they just think after a certain amount of time. they'll just shut that down and try somewhere else?
Trenton - It's well, it's, what they'll probably do is hit the back button to go back to the search engine they've just been using to go to one of your competitors. Competitors are always a click away, No sorry 100 competitors are always a click away. And with er, it's over 70% of the UK population on broadband now, it's so quick and easy to surf around the web. We're getting more and more impatient on the web. Usability is becoming more and more important to users, because if you can't find what you're looking for, you'll go to a website where you can.
William - Yeah. I'll tell you what the thing that annoyed me this weekend, and I won't mention where it was because I can't remember, I looked at half a dozen. But I was searching on sites for TV's and I wanted to put the TV's in price, because you can sometimes put it in order can't you?
Trenton - Yes, yeah absolutely right.
William - Price order, lowest first. But what they'd done on a couple of these sites and I couldn't find a way of filtering this out, they'd put everything related to TV's in that category. So starting with the lowest price, you get remote controls, you get scart leads, you get all the other leads, you get video tapes, and this was going on for pages. And I thought, I don't want that, I want to find the cheapest TV you do.
Trenton - And it's so frustrating isn't it?
William - If I'd have found it, I might have bought it. So you're absolutely right.
Trenton - No, I find myself you know I mean I sometimes have to step away from my profession and just find myself surfing the web to buy things and I tell you, William, I just sometimes want to rip my arm off and hurl it at my computer, I'm so frustrated. Yeah.
William - Trenton! Don't go that far. Because otherwise you won't be able to...
...laughter...
Trenton - Well no, I wouldn't be able to do my job very well with er, if I ripped both arms off so I'd better keep my emotions in check. But no, I just hit back and I go back to Google and find someone else.
William - All right, well OK, well I like the idea that there's somebody like you looking at all these sites and feeding this information back to these people.
Ah right, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for joining us.
Trenton - Excellent, thanks William.
William - Trenton Moss from Webcredible. They're web usability consultants.