The Value of User Testing for Online Boutiques
June 10th, 2007
We’ve been talking about performing some usability testing on our website for awhile, and today we finally accomplished that goal. It was amazing. All these “little” things that I’ve let myself think nothing of were actually big glitches for the user.
I can not believe how much I learned by sitting silently behind someone and watching them browse our site. Luckily for me, I’ve worked with our site tester for years, so I knew she would be perfect. She was perfect because, as she says, “I have no patience for anything, if I don’t like, I’m gone”. Plus, she’s really good at thinking out loud, so I could take notes on what was tripping her up.
The good news for us was that she had no problem navigating the site and felt confident shopping on our site because of our privacy and security notices.
The bad news was the number of glitches during the checkout process that must’ve been driving people batty. However, this is good news too. Believe me, it’s comforting to find reasons people are abandoning their shopping carts - makes the site traffic conversion rate make a lot more sense.
We’ve already used her feedback to streamline the checkout process, and I’m starting to make some of her recommended content edits and changes.
If you are running an online boutique, I recommend you get user testing on your site. Highly recommend it. Sit behind someone and observe your site in action. Give the user some generic directions - mine were “you’re shopping for a cool baby shower gift”.
The first thing our user did was google our business name, rather than typing the name into the URL. She was then impressed that the whole first page of google results had to do with our business and that product reviews showed up.
The website designing and traffic building is a constant process of improvement. I feel SO much better about our site after seeing someone else use it.
Entry Filed under: Apparel & Accessory Merchandising, Online Boutique
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