Web Usability: "Keeping an Eye on the Competition"

DETROIT, MI - My friend, Kevin Ertell over at RetailShakenNotStirred has a great post on web usability titled "Is elitism the source of poor usability?"

According to Kevin, "Most sites are still achieving single digit conversion rates even though customer intent-to-purchase rates are 20% or higher in most cases."  Kevin suspects that this problem stems from sites being too complicated for the average user.

I'm sure he's right.  And it's not that users are stupid; it's that the average consumer gets hit with +5000 commercial messages a day and they just don't have the time or patience for any site that doesn't conform to the Golden Rules of User Interface Design.

The result?  A site's passersby intend to purchase something +20% of the time, but more than half of the time, they are prevented from doing so by poor usability.  So mathematically, a site's owner could more than DOUBLE his revenues by simply improving his site's usability.  >Forehead smack!<

Friends, this ain't about traffic.  It's about optimizing the user's experience, and according to Kevin the best way to do that is to simplify one's approach to web design.  Hence Kevin's question, ...

"Is elitism the source of poor usability?"

As an ecommerce recruiter, I see this all the time.  Web designers fail to see their work as a means to greater customer intimacy and instead get caught up the latest widgets and gadgets that will give them bragging rights among their friends.  Crazy.

Keeping an Eye on the Competition

Smart usability is often a byproduct of smart competitive intelligence, and sometimes the best way to "keep it real" in web design is to see what your competitors are doing.  Don't forget that if a customer intends to purchase something 20% of the time and you lose his interest more than half the time, he's likely going to buy from your competitor.  Therefore, "good" usability is relative to your competition.  You're not trying to change the world.  Your simply trying to convert a sale.  Period.

Here's a tip:  Run a Google search for just the relevant product pages of specific competitors.

For example, if I worked for AJMadison.com and wanted to know what my competitors were doing, I might follow these steps:

1.) Use the "related" operator to see who Google thinks my competitors are based on the competitors' meta data, like so: http://tinyurl.com/m5s4hl

2.) Looking at my own homapage's source code, I would know that my own categories are: "Gas Ranges, Ovens, Stoves, Washers, Dryers, Dishwashers, bosch, ranges, refrigerator, oven, appliances, refrigerators, Air Conditioners, microwave, washer dryer combo, whirlpool"

3.) To get a basic feel for how a specific competitor merchandises their whole site, use the Google "site" operator, like this: http://tinyurl.com/mfraxn. It's often a good idea to run this search for every competitor (see step 1).  Used with a Google toolbar and a highlighter key, you can see where and how the keywords appear on any product page -- and in my opinion this is a usability issue.

4.) Finally, to see how a specific competitor merchandises a particular product category, such as "gas ranges," you can use a modified version of the Google "site" operator from Step 3. See http://tinyurl.com/nggdzb.  (Check out the Adwords results on the right.)

It often helps to run this last search for every keyword in the homepage's source code.  It's a pain, but this is a great way to see what navigational elements your competitors may be trying out.

Finally, two great browser plugins to complement this quick-n-dirty process are Chris Pederick's web developer toolbar for Firefox and of course, the almighty SEO toolbar by Aaron Wall.  Both are free.

The SEO Toolbar can show you how well optimized any product page is in a given search result, which will tell you a lot about how important that product is to the success of a particular competitor's business.  On a deeper level, it will automatically tell you the number of del.icio.us bookmarks a page has, the number of Diggs; the number of Stumbles; the number of Twitter mentions; and MUCH more.

As a rule, shoppers don't bookmark and Tweet and Stumble crappy pages.  Sometimes the companies do these things themselves, but only for pages they feel proud.  And in my experience, "important" pages are tested and tweaked more frequently than unimportant pages -- and those are the ones you really want to monitor for changes.
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Comments

[Jeff C]

User satisfaction in terms of usability and performance must be the top goals of any web site master. It takes a lot of discipline not to get lost in technological warfare.

[Alex Dropshipping Kei]

Thanks for the addons for Firefox. Those will help me a lot in my researchs (specially the SEO toolbar).

Cheers! Alex Kei.

[Stacyfaye]

I agree that user friendly navigation is of utmost imprtance for a website to keep the user interested long enough to consider further exploration of the site.

[Success Coach]

You are right. Usability is really very important because this will engage more visitors to explore your site. And the longer they stay, the more likely they will purchase something.

[Sara Martin]

Optimization isn’t an issue the significant thing to consider is friendly usability of a site. You are absolutely right that most of the visitors are impatient and they don’t have much time to explore if they find a site very complicated. Unsurprisingly, visitor will leave you behind and make some healthy sales from your competitor. In addition, if you face this kind of situation then just ask those people who were about to make sales but didn’t. Ask them what went wrong with them and make necessary changes in site design.

[Jessica]

Great Info! Thanks for the post!

[Rod Macbeth]

I strongly believe in K.I.S.S.

[Oscar]

Hm, really interesting tips. I totally agree that a lot of people who complain that they don't get people to stay on their site simply aren't following great design practices. I'll need to try following your steps for keeping an eye on competition; that definitely looks helpful. Maybe it would also be helpful to search for videos by the competition on YouTube. I think a good way to get exposure in general for any brand these days is to run a video on YouTube, Vimeo, and AdWido. It's free anyway.