Consumers to E-Commerce Sites: Simplify or We Walk - ' Customers Will Abandon You '
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Almost one in five business-site visitors told Golesworthy's team they would abandon a site if they found it too difficult—or insufficiently intuitive—to use.
"If you are searching for flights and you don't like Expedia, you can just go to Orbitz," he said.
But Expedia and Orbitz are e-commerce examples where the sites—like Amazon and Google—provide a service to the customer. Presumably, a customer will endure a little more when they are getting desired information right back.
But what about brochure sites? The sites that are trying to persuade prospects to use their product or service: How much leeway will most prospects give them?
Golesworthy points to an even greater danger for some service companies. Let's say that a major bank starts offering free online account access, but the access is slow, buggy and conflict-ridden.
Chase is one of the large banking firms supporting online access as well as contactless payments. How safe are those efforts? To find out, click here.
Will its customers—who are ostensibly open to electronic banking—simply not use that site and deal with the bank the old-fashioned way? Or will they move all of their accounts to a different bank that can deliver a functional online experience?
"The customer may stop doing business with you altogether," he said. "They won't bail on you as a site. They may bail on you as a company."
There is also a speed-of-Web-response factor. The survey found that 56 percent of people will not wait more than one day before they will write off an e-mail as ignored.
The survey results offered good news—"They don't need it in an hour"—but most stressed that e-mail access needs to be taken seriously. A mere two- or three-day delay in response may do the proverbial more harm than good.
Then you factor in the influence that Web research has on almost all purchases today.
"The consumer is looking to find things quickly and easily. They don't want to go through" a lot of links that link to other links, Golesworthy said.
The CIO of the 1,138-store CSK auto-parts chain agrees that search capabilities are critical today and it's the heart of a multimillion-dollar system upgrade. To hear his rationale, click here.
To that end, most sites today are absolutely lousy about site navigation. In general, that includes three tools: an FAQ (frequently asked questions) section; an intuitive and complete site map; and an accurate site search.
Barely 42 percent of the surveyed sites had all three, he said.
Not only are sites making bad assumptions about bandwidth and users' interest in pointless animated presentations, but they are starting to make bad assumptions about screen size. On the one hand, laptop screens are getting significantly larger to the point where they are approaching—and sometimes exceeding—their desktop cousins. But much smaller screens—such as those on smart phones and hybrid PDAs, along with some airline displays and other new devices—are also gaining in popularity.
When faced with such a huge number of different sizes, the only viable design approach is to create a resizable page. And yet—you saw this coming, didn't you?—the survey found that an impressive 87 percent of Web sites today are not resizable.
Multimedia is no longer limited to the Web and might be one of the first tactics to move from the Web back to the brick-and-mortar. To read how many merchants are leveraging multimedia in stores, click here.
For that matter, most are not sufficiently accessible to the visually impaired, despite the fact that one out of five Americans have such a hardship, Golesworthy said.
Another problem area for Web sites today is cookies. Cookies have morphed from being a site visitor convenience to often being essential. I cannot read stories from New Jersey's largest newspaper because its site continually insists that it can't find my cookie, so it puts me into an endless loop of reg form completion.
Registration forms today are their own controversy. Companies are moving beyond the name, rank and serial number approach and demanding that prospects fill out extensive questionnaires. The fact that this causes many otherwise attractive prospects to flee doesn't seem to be dampening the trend.
Maybe Thoreau was right?
"Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest," Henry David Thoreau wrote. "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."
Had Thoreau been a Web developer, I would have been honored to have visited his pages.
Retail Center Editor Evan Schuman has tracked high-tech issues since 1987, has been opinionated long before that and doesn't plan to stop any time soon. He can be reached at Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com.
To read earlier retail technology opinion columns from Evan Schuman, please click here.
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