On Oct 9, 2009, at 7:03 AM, Sam Menter wrote:
Jared - I'm sure you have a strong opinion on this, would love to hear
it : ) Have you done any testing on this type of cart?
Hi Sam,
I have tested sites that look like this. There's a whole bunch of
things happening here, some good and some I think probably cause
problems.
I think that leaving the shopper on the page with their product makes
sense, particularly since there's strong lateral links to other
products on the page. Going to a page that just has a cart will do
what Harry said, encourage the shopper to only purchase the one item.
If the goal is to increase order size, you probably don't want to go
to the cart.
A third alternative is to do what Amazon does and give a new gallery
page that contains likely items the shopper might also want. However,
this only really works if you've got an analytics engine that can
truly predict highly-likely next purchases. If you just post random
items, it's likely to be the same as posting nothing. Amazon is good
at this. Most sites don't have the data or the analysis tools to pull
this off.
Another example of a site that stays on the page really well is
LandsEnd.com. When you add a product to their shopping bag, it pops up
a layered dialog that asks you if you want to checkout or keep
shopping. In our studies, this has performed really well and does tend
to increase order size.
A big difference between the Lands' End and House of Fraser is that
Lands' End is modal, while House of Fraser is not. Both pop up a
message saying that you can add to the cart, but the House of Fraser
message disappears quite quickly. A shopper who isn't paying close
attention could miss the interaction. (There's also a quick animation
of the item adding to the upper left cart summary, but this could also
easily be missed.)
In our studies, shoppers didn't seem flustered by having to dismiss
the dialog (either by pressing Keep Shopping or Shopping bag). Keep in
mind, that on the Lands' End site, a common shopping behavior is to
get the same product with different colors. (Men, for example, once
they find a style of pants they like, will order different colors in
the same size.) This design is tuned for that behavior. You'll want to
tune your design for the behavior of your shoppers, which will vary
based on the products you're selling and the audience you're selling to.
There's another behavior on House of Fraser that I wouldn't emulate:
If the shopper choose a product, but leaves out a selector, say size,
the Add to Cart button is disabled without any visible indication.
While this makes sense on a technical level (you need size to
purchase), I'd bet that we'd see users not understanding why they
can't continue, as the only error message appears in a tooltip. Either
there should be a message near the button (and it should look
unavailable) or it should pop up a message.
(This is a place where I could see improving the Lands' End
experience: If you don't select the size and press Add to Bag, it pops
up an error message telling you that you need to select a size.
However, I'm thinking it would be even better if it provided the pull-
down for size in that error dialog. Why make the user dismiss the
error and hunt for the size selector they obviously missed the first
time?)
The other thing I would look at closely before emulating House of
Fraser's design is their choice of buttons to view the bag & checkout.
It's pretty subtle in the current design. I wonder if shoppers have to
hunt for it a little too much. I would think that a talented visual
designer (which they obviously have access to) could come up with
something better than a link to start the checkout process. If I saw
shoppers stalling on this, I'd suggest making it a little more
visually obvious.
In general, I think the House of Fraser design is ok. But, if you
watch people shop as often as I have, you'll learn that the devil is
in the details on these things. It's very dependent on the shopping
context, the types of products being sold, and the nature of the
store. What works well for one site will fail miserably for another,
because one of those factors has subtly changed.
Hope that helps,
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: jsp...@uie.com p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: @jmspool
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