Is your website a turn-off?

Some websites are potentially losing millions of pounds of business due to cumbersome processes and user frustration, to the benefit of competitors who are just a few clicks away. How do you evaluate your site and take action to ensure that yours isn’t one of them?

By Neil Davey, editor

How important is your website experience to your customers? Given the emphasis put on the online channel these days, that question is a no-brainer – very important! So as we all knew the answer to that question, why is it that the online experience can still be such a chore for many consumers? Although 2006 was another record year for annual online sales and Christmas e-tailing exceeded all expectations, a rash of recent studies suggest that companies continue to risk losing valuable business by failing to take their customers’ online needs into consideration.

A poll by Webcredible, for instance, reveals that consumer frustration could be causing as many as 16 million UK internet users to abandon their orders before checkout. Hidden charges and forcing users to register before buying a product are just two of the biggest turn-offs. A further study by Webcredible suggests that many of the UK’s biggest retailers are simply making it too difficult for shoppers to browse, find and pay for goods online, with Top Shop and Next among the chief culprits.

But it’s not just the retailers that are driving their customers to distraction. Analysis of 100 leading websites in the telecoms, utility, banking, travel and consumer electronics sectors by Transversal discovered that online customer service could be equally disappointing – and the study concluded that service levels were actually worse than in 2005.

This is a major cause for concern as analyst group Forrester Research suggests that every customer who has a bad experience on a website will tell 10 other people about it. If the daunting power of ‘word of mouth’ is spelling out your company’s name, you most certainly want it to be mentioning you in positive terms. “Some websites are potentially losing millions of pounds of business due to cumbersome processes and user frustration, to the benefit of competitors who are just a few clicks away,” suggests Trenton Moss, director of Webcredible.

Growing pains

So where exactly are websites going wrong? At the risk of flying in the face of convention by answering a question with a question: where do you want to begin?! Lengthy checkout processes, no telephone contact options and a failure to provide clear delivery details are three of the main offenders. James Roper, CEO of IMRG, a global body for e-tailing, insists that the customer experience continues to improve, but concedes that with the platform still maturing, there are still some growing pains.

“It is getting better but some sites still aren’t very good at providing, for instance, real-time stock visibility,” he suggests. “The worst manifestation of that is when you place an order and you think you have secured the goods only to get an e-mail a few days later saying that they can’t supply you until stocks come in and that could be between 3-7 weeks.”

Elsewhere, research by Transversal found that 69 percent of sites studied could answer fewer than four of the ten most often asked customer questions. Kerry Bodine is principal analyst in Forrester Research’s Customer Experience group. In the last two years, Forrester has reviewed over 200 websites for clients, with a mere three percent of the sites passing its evaluation criteria.

“One of the highest failure rates concerns whether the site presents privacy and security policies,” she explains. “You may have to fill out a form and enter your personal information, but is the site going to present a link to the privacy policy in context, rather than buried in the page in six point font, so that you can feel comfortable using the site? 83 percent of the sites that we evaluated failed that criteria.”

Fundmamental problems

There are more fundamental problems experienced by other sites. “Text legibility is one of the most commonly failed criteria,” she explains. “It is amazing the amount of sites that make their text too small or don’t have sufficient contrast between the foreground and background colours so that it is difficult to read. 79 percent of the sites we evaluate have failed this criteria.”

The IMRG recently launched its ‘Safe and Sound’ campaign to make the internet available to millions more users with disabilities such as the visually impaired – a population that has too often been neglected by the web community. IMRG’s Roper has chaired the National Conference for the British Standards Institution on Website Accessibility for the past two years.

“Most companies don’t consider this issue,” he suggests. "It is a new industry and it is quite difficult for a lot of businesses to do the basic stuff, let alone to have to cope with accessibility. That being said, many of the things that you need to do to make a site accessible are actually very simple and cheap. The most important thing is user-friendly design – and we find that this doesn’t just help disabled people, it helps everyone.”

Roper cites the example of the BBC weather page, which originally featured the days of the week across the top of the page with the columns displaying the weather report running down. It was virtually impossible for blind users with screen readers to make sense of it. But by turning the chart around and running the days down the side and the weather report across the top, it was immediately viewable.

“You can see how very simple changes can make a huge amount of difference,” says Roper. “But people who can see normally will probably not even be aware of the problem. The alt tags on the pictures on your site may all say ‘photo’, for example, which is useless to a blind person – but if it said “photo of the Queen on a horse” for instance, then it would be useful.”

Website evaluation

Fortunately, there are numerous tactical techniques that businesses can deploy to evaluate their site and determine users’ needs. One option is to invest in a web analytics system that enables firms to study the behaviour of people on their site, view where they are dropping off and where they beat a well-worn path for certain content, and find content that is never used.

“Intercontinental Hotels discovered a ‘pogosticking’ behaviour when it used web analytics, with customers going back and forth between the hotel search result and the individual hotel pages,” Bodine highlights. “It knew there was a problem so tried a few different things. When it moved the range of available rates from the individual hotel pages up to the search results page there was a huge increase in booking. It had assumed that if it took the range of available rates on the first results page that people would price shop it and won’t book - but actually they booked much more.”

One of the easiest – and cheapest – ways to evaluate a site is to simply choose a user goal that would be applicable for your site and then walk through from the home page to try and accomplish that mission. Put yourself in your users’ shoes – who are they and what knowledge do they have about your company and the task they want to achieve? This helps you approach aspects like navigation and terminology from the users’ point of view and helps you better understand their experience and identify any problems. And of course, you can also always reach out to your customers. In particular, if you are redesigning the site you have the opportunity to talk to your users and watch them use both your site and your competitors’ sites to gain valuable insight before you begin the construction process.

Despite the flak that company websites have attracted in recent weeks, however, it is worth reminding ourselves of how much the average online experience has improved. The channel is still maturing and businesses are hungry to learn how to better cater for their customers.

“It is a new industry,” emphasises Roper. “And it is getting better very quickly in terms of the general levels of satisfaction that the consumers are reporting. If it wasn’t reasonably satisfactory, we wouldn’t have the huge consumer spending that we’re seeing online. But for professionals looking at what is possible all of the time, we can see so much more that can be achieved.” Will the customer experience continue to improve? That’s another no-brainer…

What are the biggest problems you have experienced whilst visiting websites? Have you made any changes to your own site that have been a revelation for your users? Why not share your thoughts with the community!