Comments on: E-Commerce User Experience

By: Jack Dawson

Jack Dawson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:04:14 +0000

If you are serious about learning what makes eCommerce sites work for the users you are looking at the right book. While there are many other good books on the subject, this is has to be the 400-lb gorilla! Here’s why:- every guideline and recommendation is supported with examples of real user behavior. In fact, it is this insight into what users do that makes it especially valuable for anyone trying to justify investing in usability. – the chapters on selling strategies and trust show how online store design impacts the site’s overall success with its customers;- the chapters on category pages, search, product pages, and checkout & registration show in detail how design decisions on those particular parts of a typical eCommerce site can help or hurt their effectiveness in guiding the customer to the product and through the checkout;- the methodology chapter will be extremely useful for anyone who wants to conduct their own usability tests. It not only documents how the tests were conducted, but also gives tons of valuable tips on task creation, test facilitation, etc. Also included are various pre- and post-test questionnaires, a consent form, and the list of all the tasks. This book (or report, if you will) spends most of its time on my night table and is the inspiration behind my own UI design book, free at paulgokin dotcom. If you own/design B-to-C eCommerce web sites, get this report. It will pay for itself many times over in increased conversion rate on your site (provided, of course, that you implement the guidelines it contains).
Rating: 5 / 5

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:34:28 +0000

I work in eCommerce for a leading online retailer (Australia) and I thought I knew pretty much all I could. This book showed me the intricacies of user behaviour and web usablitily and offered several great tips to tweak and improve my website. However, I would say the remaining 80% of the book covered areas I was already familiar with, so those in the industry – do a bit more research online before you invest in this expensive book.

For those new to eCommerce usability, I highly recommend this book. Very valuable to know the fundamentals and rules of user behaviour, so in future we can all be navigating easy-to-use and feature rich eCommerce sites.

Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ is also a great book (and a definite read for anyone interested in eCommerce), but this book takes a more professional approach – Krug’s is mostly about ‘concept’ whereas Neilsen’s is more about ‘action’.

One last thing – don’t be dissuaded that this book was written in 2001 – that’s young in the Internet world. It would have been good, though, to maybe see a new edition of this book with more recent/updated eCommerce sites.
Rating: 4 / 5

By: W. Ulle

W. Ulle — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:08:31 +0000

I’ve been an e-commerce professional since the mid-nineties, and I echo what Thomas said in his review. I only THOUGHT I knew what was needed to achieve excellence in e-commerce.

This book is work the price because you’re not getting mere opinion, vision and cleverness. You’re getting the results from a big pile of research — expensive research you would probably never fund on your own.

Hard numbers support every bit of advice that this book offers. It takes someone like Jakob Nielsen to back up their suggestions with that level of substance.

Rating: 5 / 5