10 Feb 2008 1906H

E-commerce shopping experiences

This last week at work, towards the end at least, I had the opportunity to take a look at how various teams are handling various aspects of the online shopping experience and was somewhat surprised — I don’t know why, since I look at this stuff pretty much everyday — to find how much has not changed since the first shopping carts emerged, I guess, what, circa 1997? When you think about it, what we have are four, maybe five distinct “modes,” that make up what we might call the classic e-commerce shopping experience: one each for browsing & selecting, reviewing the contents of the cart, checking out, maintaining account information for future orders, and checking up on the status of orders pending and past. So why is it that now, despite over 10 years of experience designing for e-commerce, that so often in the shopping experience we hinder people, while they are in these modes, from trying to accomplish the tasks they want to do? Ordinarily, the classic model would force a user to locate an item or browse through a range of items, during which there is a lot of churn, back and forth between master and detail pages, while the user susses out what’s good for them, and then we go into a cart page, before the user goes back to the homepage to search for the next item, and then somewhere the user might choose to go checkout but not before being sent back to the cart page one last time. Isn’t there a better way to do things?
For instance, the Quickview feature, introduced by the Gap, Inc.’s user experience team in 2005, which leverages the best of Web 2.0 technologies, contains just enough information to facilitate immediate shopping for the time-pressed shopping and impulse buying personae, but not so much that it replaces the product detail page for the browsing persona who needs more information before they choose to buy. If we were to implement Quickview for ourselves, one might ask that if we’re interrupting the shopping experience by sending users to a product detail page, then a cart view, then shouldn’t we do away with the product detail page and stuff it into Quickview? I reckon that it depends on the context of the objects being shopped and the needs of the people who are shopping your site. There are clearly some things that don’t work in Quickview. Clothes work — not many options besides size and color — but appliances and big screen tvs, with all their technological info, and their many installation options, might not. And then there’s the problem that if you began to stick everything into quick view, you’re rather defeating the purpose of Quickview, which is to facilitate conversion. Too many options, as Barry Schwartz says in Paradox of Choice, and you hurt conversion. Fortunately there are so many things to fix for so many retailers. I don’t feel that there is too little work to do.

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