Customer Experience Matters

BusinessWeek recently published an article called The 10 Commandments of Web Design in which it describes these “must-follow rules:”

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
2. Thou shalt not hide content.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences.
8. Thou shalt be social.
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.
10. Thou shalt make content king.

While this wouldn’t have been my list of commandments, it contains mostly appropriate things for Web Designers to abide by.  But I need to take exception with two of the items on the list: #7 (Thou shalt create immersive experiences) and #8 (Thou shalt be social). It’s not that those are bad things to do, but they are not the right focus for ALL sites at ALL times. Many Web designs call for simple (non-immersive, non-social) experiences. So these items don’t really hold up as commandments unless you add “where appropriate” at the end of them.

Fyi, we just published our annual ”Best And Worst Of B2C Site Design, 2008” report which evaluated sites using Forrester’s 25 criteria. It turns out that the top 5 failures were in these areas: text legibility, task flow, error recovery, privacy policies, and information scent. I’ll discuss a bit more about this research in a later post.

The bottom line: 8 out of 10 right isn’t all that bad.

I’ve evaluated the usability of hundreds of Websites and given advice on online strategy to dozens of large organizations. While I can always uncover opportunities for firms to improve their Web experiences, my recommendations are never as entertaining as this YouTube video.

The bottom line: Enjoy!

This is the final post looking at US consumer satisfaction across nine different industries: banks, credit card providers, health plans, insurance firms, Internet service providers, investment firms, retailers, TV service providers, and wireless carriers. Today I’ll look at Web interactions.

Here are some highlights:

• Credit card issuers and investment firms had the highest satifaction rates (84%)
• Health plans had the lowest satisfaction rates (68%)
• USAA, Charles Schwab, Old Navy, and Amazon.com led the pack with satisfaction rates of 90% or more
• Comcast, Aetna, and Charter Communications fell to the bottom with satisfaction rates of 65% or less

The bottom line: Given the rising costs of healthcare, doesn’t it make sense to improve the low cost online channel?

I’ll start with the punchline: the Websites from 6 top presidential candidates FAILED our test for privacy.

In July 2004, I published  5 reports that applied a portion of Forrester’s Web Site Review methodology to the presidential candidate Websites for Bush and Kerry. Here are the titles and executive summaries:

• Presidential Candidate Sites Fail The Privacy Test. Forrester evaluated how the presidential candidates’ Web sites handle their privacy policies. While both sites failed, the Bush site makes its privacy policy more difficult to find.
• Bush’s Site Fails The Accessibility Test. Forrester evaluated how well the presidential candidates’ Web sites provide access to visually-impaired and hearing-impaired users. The Bush site failed against our criterion; while the Kerry site passed. But both sites could do a better job of making their sites accessible.
• Candidate Sites Aren’t Easy For Physically Impaired. Forrester evaluated how well the Bush and Kerry Web sites provide access to physically impaired users. While both sites failed our test because key navigational elements require overly precise mouse movements, the Bush site makes it easier for users to select what they need from the key left-hand navigation bar.
• Bush Site Mishandles User Errors. Forrester evaluated how well the Bush and Kerry Web sites recover from user errors. We found one major flaw: The Bush site fails to help users fix incorrect credit card information.
• Presidential Candidate Sites Are Hard To Read. Forrester evaluated the text legibility of the Bush and Kerry Web sites. Both sites failed our test because of small fonts in major navigation options and poor color contrast in other text elements.

So I decided to do it again during this presidential campaign season. The first document, called “Presidential Candidate Sites Fail On Privacy,” examines how well 6 candidate sites performed in adhering to several of Forrester’s Web Site Review criteria around “trust.” Here’s the executive summary from that report:

Presidential candidates use their Web sites to reach out to a wide range of constituents. But how effective are they at building trust during the interactions their supporters have with those sites? To help answer that question, we evaluated the sites of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson. All of the sites failed our privacy and security criteria. Candidates should make trust a major element of their site design requirements.

That’s right, the presidential candidate sites once again failed our privacy criteria.

The bottom line: Hopefully the candidates care more about privacy than they show in the design of their Websites.

A couple of analysts on Forrester’s customer experience research team, Kerry Bodine and Ross Popoff-Walker, just published a great new research report called Desirable Online Experiences: Taking Web Sites Beyond Useful And Usable. The document starts with a clear picture of today’s Web experiences:

Consumers are spending more and more time online, seeking out experiences that are relevant, engaging, and personal. However, many Web sites make users struggle to complete simple goals, have little to no emotional punch, and fail to embrace the diversity of consumers’ wants and needs.

The document discusses the three elements of an experience — useful (offers value), usable (provides easy access to value), and desirable (appeals to emotions). They note that since firms tend to struggle so much with the first two items, desirability takes the backburner. (Note: Take a look at an earlier post: Lessons Learned From 1,001 Web Site Reviews)

To overcome current lackluster online experiences, Kerry and Ross recommend three tactics for cultivating desirability:

1. Provide engaging content and functionality. Consumers often visit Web sites with specific transactional goals in mind - like purchasing some throw pillows, booking a hotel room, or transferring money from one account to another. Increasingly, online consumers also have more exploratory online goals - like looking at photos or browsing their favorite blogs.
2. Focus on aesthetics. The Web is a delivery channel for providing content and functionality, but it is also an aesthetic communication medium. Look and feel can’t be tacked on to the surface of an experience - an aesthetic blueprint needs to be integrated at its very inception.
3. Incorporate elements of game design. Online gaming is a popular activity - 50% of US online households play online games. And the appeal cuts across age and gender lines. Some firms have tried to tap into the fun by adding games to their Web sites. However, site owners can take a subtler approach by infusing their sites with elements of game design.

My take: Kerry and Ross are right — companies need to make online experiences more desireable. It’s interesting to think about what firms are required to understand before they can deliver useful, usable, and desirable experiences. To make something useful, firms need a functional description of the task — which can be developed by a business analyst who knows very little about the customer. To make something usable, firms need to understand what customers know about the task and follow established usability standards. But to make something desirable, firms need to understand what motivates customers.

So desirability will require an even higher degree of customer insight (most likely from ethnographic research). That’s good, because that knowledge can also help firms make things more usable (as firms refine their understanding of how customers accomplish tasks) and more useful (as firms uncover requirements for functionality to fulfil unmet and latent needs).

The bottom line: Companies should shoot for more desirable online (and offline!) experiences — and they’ll likely become more useful and usable as well!

Nielsen/NetRatings recently announced that it will be scrapping its long-time ranking of Websites based on the number of pages that people view on the site. Why? Because many applications now use rich Internet application (RIA) technologies like Flash and Ajax to build Internet applications that don’t need to load a new page every time a user does something. So the measure of “page views” no longer accurately reflects the actual usage of a Web site (in this new environment, for instance, a person could spend an hour just on one “page”).

Let me be the first one to say: good riddance to Web pages. When it comes to user experience, the Web was a major step backwards. It reminds me of a graphic that we created for a report that I worked on in April 2002 called The X Internet Revives UI Design:

Don’t get me wrong, the Web page has been incredibly value. The simple paradigm of a Web page has taught hundreds of millions of people how to use a digital interface. But the simplicity of the basic Web page has used virtually none of the capabilities of today’s powerful computers. As a result, we end up waiting for an entire new page to load everytime that we try and do something on the Web. Believe me, there are better experiences to be had.

If you want to see what I’m talking about, try and find a bar that you’d like in a new town using Yahoo’s old page-based maps and then try it again with its new RIA maps.

But, alas, nothing comes for free. As we leave the era of the basic Web page, we’re likely to live through a lot of usability nightmares. Why? Because creating dynamic interactions that are easy to use requires very strong design and usability skills — much more than is required for simple Web pages. And our research shows that many companies don’t even do a good job designing basic Web pages. But in the hands of a good team, these new rich Internet applications provide a lot of great capabilities.

A colleague of mine, Ron Rogowski, evaluated the usability of 22 applications — 11 using HTML pages and 11 using RIAs. Here’s a summary of his findings:

We evaluated RIA and HTML applications in each of four categories: hotel search and reservation engines, mapping tools, PC configurators, and product finders. We found that, on average, RIAs outperform HTML interfaces; at the same time, RIA usability can fall prey to basic design mistakes. To make the most of their investments, firms planning to invest in RIAs must apply design best practices and run multiple tests on their RIAs before - and after - they go live.

The bottom line: Nothing changes overnight, so we’ll still see many, many basic Web pages even in 10 years. But RIAs will continue to pop-up, creating many usability miscues along the way — heading us towards a much more dynamic Internet experience in the future. A word to the wise: Treat your good RIA designers (in-house or in your agency) well, because people with those skills will be in high demand.

Hi everyone:

This is my first blog posting — so HELLO!

I’m excited to start the blogging process by looking back at lessons we’ve learned from doing expert reviews since 1999. At Forrester, we do Web Site Reviews for our research efforts as well as for client projects.  Based on my analysis of those evaluations, I recently published a research report called “Lessons Learned From 1,001 Web Site Reviews.” (Note: Only Forrester clients can see the full report). You can also read about this research in a Q&A with Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal.

One of the most interesting findings from the data is that the problems have shifted over the years. Our criteria fall into 4 buckets: Value, Navigation, Presentation, and Trust. From 1999 through 2001, most sites failed to pass our value criteria. Today, the average site does a much better job of offering customers the value they came for, but they fail to provide adequate navigation — which currently represents the most severe category of problems for sites.

Our analysis also loked at individual criteira. The criteria that sites currently fail the most turned out to be ”Home pages that provide evidence that the user goals can be completed.” It’s hard to get a user to do something online if they don’t know that it’s possible. Ironically, two of the easiest flaws to fix — weak text legibility and poor security policies — have been nagging problems for several years.

The Web Site Review scores over the previous eight years provide insights into the state of Web site experiences, but they don’t tell the whole story. I also gave some thought to what lessons we’ve learned along the way. In my research, I identified eight of them. Rather than make my first blog continue on too long, I’ll only discuss one of the lessons learned — the most important one. So, what is this lesson learned?

It’s that Scenario Design remains the key ingredient to great experiences. While Forrester’s Web Site Review criteria have changed over the years, the guiding principle behind our customer experience recommendations and evaluations has remained the same: Scenario Design. This framework is based on the answers to three basic questions: Who are your users? What are their goals? And how can you help them achieve those goals? Firms wanting to know what content and function to provide, and how to make that content easy to find and use on their Web sites — or any channel — should constantly ask and answer those questions. The concept is simple, yet powerful. There’s a lot of change that can happen at firms when people start internalizing those questions.

So, I’ll end my first post here with two words: Scenario Design. 

Hopefully this is a start of a long-term dialogue. Feel free to post your comments.