User experience blog

Top 10 CSS3 commands

By Paul McCarthy on 12 August 2010

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Whilst recently updating our advanced CSS training course to include some CSS3 commentary, I became inspired by the amount of CSS3 that’s already out there. Browsers such as Firefox and Safari have really started embracing CSS3, which means that there’s a significant audience that you could be demonstrating your CSS3 skills to.

I have put together Top 10 CSS3 commands, some of which are fairly widely known and also some that personally I find interesting (Box-sizing - Old school box model).

Please let me know what you think and also any sites that you’ve seen using CSS3 as well.

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If it works for Amazon, why wouldn’t it work for your site?

By Ariana Polyviou on 9 August 2010

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When creating a new ecommerce website, one of the key issues that is likely to come up is ‘How to create a successful user interface?’ An easy answer could be ‘Do it like Amazon’ and besides, nobody can deny it, Amazon is one of the most successful ecommerce stores worldwide.

Amazon’s facts speak for themselves:

  • Listed at 17th position within the 1000 most visited sites for June 2010
  • Approximately 81,000,000 unique visitors per month
  • Around 3,600,000,000 page visits per month.
  • Market capitalization of over $50 billion

Sometimes it’s good to copy the big guys. But copying a successful design does not mean that the company’s success will be copied with it!

So, ‘If it works for Amazon, why wouldn’t it work for your site?’

Reason #1 – Amazon’s low prices offsets its imperfect user experience

Amazon definitely doesn’t have a sparkling interface design. So what is it about it that makes it so successful?

Amazon can afford to sell at cost or below cost prices, offer free delivery and still have profit! It relies on its large number of customers and its fast selling pace, which can provide cash before the payment of the goods, is due to their original supplier.

Question #1: Is this type of marketing included in your business plan?

Reason #2: Amazon’s existing customers are more important than new ones

If you’ve used Amazon before then it’s more than likely that you will easily find what you are looking for.  Firstly, because you know that in order to find the product that best suits you, you have to follow the process of:

  • Searching by a product by name
  • Choosing only one category of goods
  • Then have the sorting and filtering options enabled

Secondly, if you’re an existing user then Amazon already knows your purchasing patterns. This boosts up your chances to experience serendipity by receiving more personalised product recommendations.

Amazon has a lot of existing customers who are used to its product search process. Thus, making major changes to it involves the risk of dissatisfying its 81m+ registered customers. But what happens if you’re a new user and there’s no purchasing patterns log for you?

You’re most likely to get odd or not useful recommendations and struggle to search efficiently for the desired product. Therefore, unless you have plenty of time, patience or luck, it’s unlikely that you’ll reach a product’s best matches to your requirements.

Question #2: Can you afford transacting only with your existing customers?

Reason #3:  Amazon is continuously testing

Have you ever noticed frequent change of features in the layout of Facebook e.g. the Newsfeed?

Of course, if you are Facebook  (the website with the most traffic for June 2010) or Amazon, then you can afford to test some new designs and features directly on your users. Besides, losing some of them may not even be noticeable!

The problem with copying Amazon is that you can’t know what’s there to stay and what’s to be removed after a while. You can’t know which features have a positive and which ones have a negative return. Copying Amazon involves a high risk of copying features which are temporarily placed on the site just for experimental purposes.

Question #3: Can your ecommerce site afford having features that are possibly not usable?

Reason #4: Amazon has good customer reviews

Sometimes, people hesitate to purchase goods through ecommerce sites because they’re unable to physically see the item they’re planning to buy. Reading reviews of recent buyers of a product can provide future buyers with a clearer idea about what to expect from the purchase. It’s hard to get people to post feedback on a product. Statistically, 1 in 3000 of buyers are likely to leave a review for an item. Considering Amazon’s traffic, this still gives it enough reviews per product.

Many people choose to buy from Amazon not necessarily because of its good prices or interface but because of the trustworthy community and the content it holds.

Question #4: Is the size of your customer community analogous to the Amazon one?

Reason #5: Amazon’s famous name is enough for making its users feel secure

Have you ever noticed that Amazon does not have an EV SSL certificate? This certificate indicates when it’s safe to transact by changing the URL initials from http to https and turning the URL address bar green.

The use of this certificate is critical for making customers feel safe and confident to purchase goods using their credit card over the Internet.  But, if you’re as popular as Amazon, then there is no trustworthiness issue.  In fact, people may not even check to see if you’re using an SSL certificate.

Question #5: Is your  company as famous as Amazon?

In summary…

If your answers aren’t ‘Yes’ for the questions #1-5, then perhaps you should rethink before copying Amazon.

To sum up, just because the system is working for Amazon, it doesn’t mean it will work as efficiently for you. Each design is created to match a certain type of business model. If the business model of Amazon doesn’t match yours, then perhaps copying the design of Amazon to your site could be a bad idea.

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Webcredible viewpoint on affiliate marketing – the importance of partnership

By James Gurd on 4 August 2010

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The UK affiliate market broke the £4bn sales barrier in 2009, with over £240m paid out in affiliate commissions (more stats available from the Econsultancy Internet Statistics Compendium 2010). Behind these numbers lays an important human factor; 34% of UK affiliates work full-time running websites as commercial enterprises; only 20% are hobbyists. As a merchant, it’s important to walk a mile in their shoes and understand what would motivate them to give your brand preferential exposure.

Individual affiliates are under pressure. Putting the economic downturn to one side, the rise of voucher sites and super-affiliates (the likes of Quidco) is putting greater pressure on web owners to invest in their websites to acquire and retain visitors. Indeed, 43% of affiliates cite voucher code websites as a direct threat to their business.

At the same time, the affiliate population is ageing slightly. The proportion of affiliates under 30 has dropped from over 30% to nearer 25%. So, affiliates are under economic and competitive pressure and at the same time they are getting older; this means they have more experience. The net result is that the affiliate market is maturing and the business model must be in-tune. For many years merchants have relied on the pull of their brand to make affiliates take the burden of effort.

However, enlightened digital marketers have embraced a new model for many years, though not all merchants have cottoned on. The new model bases affiliate marketing on strategic partnership, building direct relationships with top affiliates.

It makes sense. Behind the websites are people. These people need to make a living. They will work better with merchants who take them seriously and work in partnership for mutual benefit.

Affiliate marketing has to be a two way street if you are to optimise investment and drive sustainable growth. The more effort you put into strategic partnerships, the more effort you will get back from affiliates and this will help you drive brand exposure and traffic from your affiliate channel.

The Webcredible article on affiliate marketing takes a closer look at the value of partnership. Please take a read and share your comments.

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What’s happening at Webcredible

By Trenton Moss on 2 August 2010

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Another month goes by here at Webcredible, and it seems to have flown by in record time. Summer is supposed to be a quiet period where we finally get round to doing those non-urgent tasks that we’ve been putting off for 6 months. Not so this year though. We’ve been unbelievably busy the past month, working on a number of large projects that are finishing off (with some new ones starting almost straightaway afterwards).

We’ve also been super-busy liaising with existing clients about upcoming projects and winning quite a bit of new business. Much of this time has been frantically spent trying to fit our schedules in with our clients’ needs. We have a hugely complex and pernickety internal resourcing system (called the ‘Team Planner’) that precisely shows what we’re all (supposed to be) doing. Trying to fit all our work into this has been majorly challenging to say the least!

When not fiddling around with our resourcing system I’ve been working hard on bringing in new business (as I always do) and we’ve won some really interesting projects, which we’ll be kicking off shortly. Our favourite projects are always ones which combine both research and design, as it means we can create interfaces based on actual user and business requirements. Quite a few of our projects are research-only, which whilst they’re always interesting can be a little disappointing when - despite our best endeavour - our recommendations aren’t always implemented in the way we envisaged.

The company seems to have had quite a government-focus in July, with the following happening:

  • We published our 4th annual council report, evaluating the top 20 Socitm council websites against 20 best practice usability guidelines. The average usability score went slightly down, which was a bit disappointing. With the massive government cuts coming the way of all the councils, they’ve got to sort their websites out if they’re to truly make some cost savings.
  • We exhibited at the Building Perfect Council Websites ‘10 conference (for the first time), which was a lot of fun. We caught up with some clients and met a whole bunch of new people, many of whom seemed to enjoy our sweets!
  • Our Head of UX, Pete Broadbent, hosted a roundtable discussion on usability at the conference. It was a really interesting discussion which seemed to get great feedback from those participating. Read Pete’s blog post for more on what they spoke about.

We also had our CSR day at Webcredible in July. We have at least one away day each year and this year we took part in the Community Games Project, part of Give & Gain Day. The day was all about mobilising local children in London to take part in all sorts of different sports, to show them how sport could have a positive impact in their lives. We all put on our sports shoes and ran around with the kids having lots of fun! Afterwards, in a state of exhaustion we went off to do some cocktail making and then ended up in the London Icebar.

Another new development happened in July with regards to our training courses, in that they’ve gone regional. We’re running our usability & accessibility training stream courses in Bristol, Cardiff and Birmingham later on this year (as well as London) and will likely follow this up with some more locations.

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Building Perfect Council Websites ‘10 conference

By Pete Broadbent on 15 July 2010

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of chairing a discussion attended by representatives from 10 different councils at the Building Perfect Council Websites ‘10 conference at Olympia.

I spent a few minutes headlining the findings from our 2010 council report The Devil Is in the Detail and then opened up the discussion. The overwhelming consensus was that all council sites need to improve in some way but there are a number of challenges to overcome to achieve this:

  • Getting budgets for citizen research and usability studies in a time of extreme cost cutting is going to difficult
  • High reliance on third party software vendors to make changes to self service functionality needs to resolved
  • Balancing internal and external stakeholder expectations needs careful management
  • Large and inflexible site structures that have grown organically over the years need to be refined
  • Unused and unnecessary content needs to be edited or removed

We discussed a number of approaches and techniques for getting citizens involved in the design process that won’t break the bank. Techniques I’ve used before include:

  • Setting up informal usability testing sessions in a library, shopping centre or council offices
  • Undertaking detailed desk-based research that combines expert website evaluation alongside detailed analyses of website statistics to build a picture of what is working and what is suboptimal
  • Focus group research to gather feedback quickly with multiple demographic groups
  • Small-scale usability sessions with a small number of participants to validate the desk research and flesh out the common problems and concerns
  • Telephone call observation and interviews with contact centre representatives to identify the top issues that people contact the council about

As with all user-centered design it’s imperative that careful consideration is done upfront when planning the research. A coherent research plan will ensure that the component parts work together to build one picture and validate each other. The target audience needs to be agreed upfront and if recruiting for usability testing be very specific who you want to test with and recruit appropriately; there’s little value testing your self service functionality with someone who’ll never use it or has little or no interest in the tasks you give them.

Above all it’s important to remember that any citizen involvement is better that none!

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