Today's Surfing Pleasure
1. This article- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070618/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_jumpers - made me think about the whole concept of Experience Design. Artist sets out statues of himself around London, spurs 911 calls b/c people think they are roof jumpers. Was that really the experience he hoped to design??
2. 111 "Add to Cart" Icons-- as an industry can't we do better than this? See them all: http://www.getelastic.com/add-to-cart-buttons/
There's not universal theme or concept --- carts, basked, bags; add vs buy; +, >, or nothing.
I think the only stylitic addition any of them have are the Bath & Body Works and Macy's buttons. Of course, I'm not going to be the only one to notice that. I expect to see this popping up all over.
Posts
4 comments:
I don't have the book itself on-hand, but Neilsen's Designing Web Usability (link) has an anecdote about some site replacing their "shopping card" with a "shopping sled" at Christmastime. Online sales dropped precipitously. People are more sophisticated now, but I still think changing your shopping cart to a "brown bag" or whatever disrupts expectations--and not for any important reason.
Well, I do think without the actual text, "add to bag" the bags would not work. "Add to sled"... ugh!
When I saw those my immediate thought was a little different that what they had done-- namely that stores w/ distinctive actual carts - like Target.com - could use THIER CART in the add to cart.
Or that amazon could use the highly iconic (now) amazon box. I spotted an amazon box in the mailroom at work from 15 feet away yesterday!
You're right, it would require usability testing. But I think a store bag is better than NO bag, which is what so many of these icons have.
Well, I'd do it. But, in my experience, people who actually do high-traffic ecommerce are very careful about such changes. They'll A/B test something like that until they're blue in the face. Of course, A/B tests can't measure the full effect of a site experience over time. Unless you consider Amazon.com and BN.com to be the world's greatest A/B test.
I went to a seminar for government webmasters a few months back. The speaker started talking about A/B testing and the government audience sort of looked at him and went, "your point being."
The world I work in rarely have a full path someone needs to get down. Usually more like "what's the fastest way to get someone the information they want" than "how do we decrease drop-outs on purchase". (Amazon recently added a survey for that, which I said, "two weeks to leave your warehouse is not worth supersaver shipping. ordering from someone else.")
It is always interesting to watch the people who have actual budgets and software for usability and see where they go with this.
Post a Comment