08 Sep 2008 0706H

Just because it works in a u-test. . .

doesn’t necessarily mean that the user will be incented (incentivized?) to take an action. In other words, beyond the role that user experience plays in making things findable and easy to use — for those of us who work in e-commerce, anyway — there is this other role we play in promotion of features.

For instance, the task in a u-test might be that we are looking for a camera but because we are accident prone would like to get the store’s extended care for that product. Of course, within the context of that test the user can only search the site to find the thing they’re looking for: we could bury it down a page under the fold and the user may or may not find it.

But findability in and of itself doesn’t necessarily mean that the user will take that action. It is an entirely different question as to whether or not the user who comes to your site will, in fact, add the in-store purchase protection plan or habitually rejects it, and if the intent of the business is to boost the numbers of customers who have purchased this highly profitable sideline, then, it then falls upon user experience to actually help craft such an experience, provided of course that that is the metric upon which success is determined.

Where the item is positioned on the page, if and how a feature interrupts the user’s shopping experience, the visual messaging, how that feature interacts with other features, all contribute to the user experience for a given element. And if you do decide to bury the PPP under the fold, given my experiences with false bottoms on web pages, we might even posit that if the user doesn’t see it, they won’t act on it unless they’re actively looking for something. . . .

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Filed under Information Architecture, Information Design, Usability, User Experience, Web

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