Is your site really working?

If you think your electronic-commerce site is easy to use, think again. It probably is not.

Despite funneling millions of dollars into commerce sites, most companies actually make their sites prohibitive to making sales, according to industry observers.

In a traditional brick-and-mortar shopping mall, consumers do not have to figure out how to pay for their items specific to each store they visit. The consumers go in, select their items, go to a cashier and pay for them.

And until this is the same experience that consumers have online, there will be a barrier to entry, according to one industry analyst.

"People expect that experience the same way they can go into a fast food restaurant and get what they want easily and predictably," said Jim Balderston, an industry analyst at Zona Research, in Redwood City, Calif.

"Those expectations are in place, and when someone makes a customer jump through hoops, those sites are going to have trouble getting and retaining customers," Balderston said. "I don't go to Amazon.com because it's my neighborhood bookstore. I go there because I can easily find a book and buy it quickly."

One of the problems, according to Web usability consultant Mark Hurst, is that high-end computer users are designing the sites for less-skilled users, and that disconnection is made painfully obvious during usability studies.

"Development teams work for a long time on the same site and they develop a sort of tunnel vision, where they don't see the problems that the site has," said Hurst, president of Creative Good, in Tarrytown, N.Y.

During usability tests, according to Hurst, many users did not know they could scroll down for more information, and one user became upset when she put her cursor in a text field for comments and accidentally deleted some of the characters that were there.

"She was concerned she deleted words from their Web site," Hurst said. "So she very carefully retyped the Web site so she left it as she found it. We saw things like that again and again."

Of course, if you look at commerce sites, most of them tout their ease-of-use as one of the selling points. So, it's not as though sites don't recognize this as a concern, they just don't realize to what level they need to address it, Hurst added.

"Philosophically, companies tend to make sites as easy as they think they should make them, and they think in terms of themselves as the audience," Hurst said. "What I tell clients is [even] if you think it's easy, it's most likely still too hard for the average user out there."

Hurst has published a report on Web usability that found problems ranging from presenting too much online jargon at one time (such as the detailed specifications for a new computer or just using the word "wizard"), or misleading the user (by placing buttons reading "Click here to complete your order," which, when clicked, did not actually complete the order).

Balderston said ATMs are a good example of the kind of end-user experience people expect. ATMs have over time become more graphical, and now anticipate what the user wants, he said.

"People expect that kind of no-hassle experience. They don't want another screen to come up asking about stamps," Balderston said, comparing the ATM experience to the experience of shopping online.

When Apple Computer launched its online store in November 1997, it was lauded for its branding, sleek look, speed, and lack of jargon.

The Apple store was designed by Adjacency Brand New Media, in San Francisco. Pascal, the company's lead Web designer (who goes by just one name), said moving Apple online was easier than defining other companies online because Apple has a strong, clear brand.

"It was a lot easier for us to follow and move that brand online," Pascal said. "A lot of companies without an established brand have fewer guidelines to follow. [With Apple], it was also only one product line to deal with, so that was another advantage."

Keep it simple

Pascal said Apple CEO Steve Jobs contributed the good, better, and best user choices as launching points to either buying pre-configured or self-configured Apple computers.

This caused a ripple through other PC manufacturers' sites to make them less full of jargon and more product-focused, according to industry observers. Pascal warned other developers, though, that reducing the options for the user is not always the right thing to do.

"A lot of developers break the choices into as few as possible, and a lot of time that makes it harder for the user," Pascal said. "People are very capable of scanning for information. You want to keep it simple, but you don't want to divide things up so people have to guess where what they're looking for is hidden. It's always dependent on the content you're dealing with. There's no magic number. A lot of people think it's between three and five, but I don't think that's the case."

Pascal and other developers also stress the importance of building a solid site architecture.

Ben Rigby, principal at Akimbo Design, a Web shop in San Francisco, said the importance of good Web design is given less attention than necessary, because people are sometimes rushing to get a site online so they can hurry up and start selling everything possible.

However, this could be seen as sites putting the cart before the horse. If they fail to take the time to create a focused, organized site before launching, it will be hard for these sites to sell anything.

"There isn't any set rule for user interfaces on stores yet, and people don't understand that," said Rigby, who does usability testing on all the sites he creates.

Hurst said other organizations make the mistake of trying to mirror their internal organization onto their Web site, which always leads to a customer experience that, in his words, "sucks."

"What has to happen in those cases is the company has to build consensus, if not reorganize itself and commit to presenting a unified front on the Web site that really serves the customer's needs," Hurst said.

Both analysts and developers said that the Web design and authoring tools are not the problem, in much the same way a word processor cannot be blamed for a poorly written novel.

"There's not much the tools can really do," Pascal said. "As long as the tools aren't inhibiting the process ... the best thing the tools or the user interface designer can do for the user is stay the hell out of the way."

According to Hurst, companies need to remember that, at the end of the day, users don't care how pretty a site looks or how much work goes into a site.

"The Web is a medium of utility, and the site that enables people to get things done faster and easier will have more loyal users," Hurst said.