It’s been the week of opinions. I got into it over accessiblity at SEOMoz, in Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Accessibility? but that’s nothing compared with this blog post, ONOFF: another failed redesign. It’s about a company that advertised its brand spanking new website that was redesigned to be accessible, only to be found to be horribly not so.

I never thought about it much before, but I was forced to think about things when I reacted to a simple question like “Can there be too much accessiblity?” It depends on the context the question pertains to, but certainly, as a general query, it’s got me juiced up.

I’m wondering the same thing.

Adding accessiblity enhancements is easy if all you are doing are the basics that cover issues related to sight, readability and speed. But, if a company starts wanting to meet more visitor needs, like handheld devices and screen readers, then it takes more thought and skill on the part of the web development team. To make workarounds for JavaScript and tables are one example.

Matt Bailey’s feelings about accessibility are close to mine. He wrote about it in Why Web Accessibility?. His thinking is holistic. If you can see how one method solves several problems, the difficulty in application seems worth the extra effort involved. He writes, for example:

“Ultimately, the search engines are the most handicapped of all users. Search engines cannot see or hear, they cannot pick up visual-only cues for navigation. Because of this fact, the principle of optimizing a site for the search engines also involves optimizing a web site for the greatest number of users. Web site marketing takes on a holistic approach when awareness of basic accessibility and usability principles are implemented throughout the design, content and architecture of the site.”

I have much to learn on the topic and my own sites need massive upgrades to meet accessibility standards. As a seeing impaired user myself, I at least can make something I can read, but that’s hardly enough.

I expect there are millions of beautiful people waiting for many of us to learn what we need to learn to make web sites usable for them to use. I hope they are patient people as well.

Customer experience and customer satisfaction are said to be critical to ecommerce and brick and mortar shopping success, and of course its often the most neglected area of concern.

I like to shop online, especially at Christmas. It’s a little tradition I have because I love watching the UPS guy bringing boxes to the house. The tease of it drives the kids crazy. (An entertainment for parents that is well worth the shipping costs!)

In the Spring, I start re-supplying my gardening stuff and running to Wal-Mart for cheap deals on mulch and home maintenance projects like this year’s brilliant idea to replace the zillions of little white stones around the in-ground pool with flat patio stones. We weren’t sure what the heck we were doing but Eric took measurements and we guessed at how many 16″ tiles would fit the space we were creating.

Cash Register Experience and Trust - Case One

The lady at the outdoor cash register had some trouble looking up the price, so together we bent over her sheet of codes to scan and in a brief, friendly give and take, agreed on one to try. She rang it up and the price was as I remembered it to be. She only took cash or credit cards, no checks or debit cards, so I paid her in cash and we drove away happily with our first load of patio tiles.

Cash Register Experience and Trust - Case Two

Needing more, and having a better idea how many would fit into my car without killing it, we returned to Wal-Mart for more pieces the following weekend.

This time, the man at the register had the same sheet of paper with information to scan, but he couldn’t decide on the correct code (even when I told him the number to look up), and refused to listen to my suggestion for where it was located. Having experienced Wal-Mart service many times, and knowing better, I had brought my receipt from the first trip with me. I offered it to him to use, because it had the right code. He hemmed and hawed, not sure whether to trust me. When he finally punched in the numbers, everything matched the information from my first sales receipt. Then, he said, “We only accept cash or credit.”

To which I said, “I know. I’ve been in this line before and knew beforehand to stop and “tap mac” to get cash to bring.”

I should have never said this!

Despite the very long line of customers behind me, the man at the register shouts, “Oh, you HAD to tell me that didn’t you!” (Me and the lady behind me exchange “What the heck?” looks.) “We were told there’s bad twenties going around from the Mac machines and now I have do this to all your money first!” and he proceeds to whip out some highlighter thing and marks off eight brand new $20 bills, muttering to himself, again, that I should never have mentioned I just went to get the cash.

I glanced and giggled at the shocked lady behind me and said, “That’s it. I’m never buying stuff with cash again.” And we both rolled our eyes.

For those of you reading this outside America, yes. Things have gotten really weird over here lately.

Avoid “The Experience”. Buy Online

Click & Order or Brick & Mortar? caught my eye because it said that “A significant number of online shoppers felt there was no substitute for understanding products through sensory evaluation (54 percent).”

I like the sensory experience too. Especially springtime, in gigantic garden centers at discount stores with crazed, maniac employees.

It also claimned, “Shoppers also said it was easier to discover new products by browsing in a store (48 percent) and to get customer assistance in person (40 percent).”

Define the words “customer assistance”, please.

I’ve heard of shopping online from a store’s web site and then going to their physical store to make the purchase.

I wonder how many people are chased to the Internet by lousy brick and mortar experiences?

I remember one of my favorite web designers explaining to me why her business phone number was splattered visibly all over her web site. I thought it looked a little silly. She said she took no chances that her visitors would:

A. Not find it

B. Have some stupid excuse for not using it.

She was VERY customer service oriented and it showed.

Phone numbers are tricky things. If you work from home, and your product or service is International, this could present some thought to time zones and privacy. I don’t list my phone number because I won’t answer it if I’m testing a site. (Unless its family of course, and they run the risk that I’ll be non-conversational and snippy.)

Anyway, I hypocritcally insist to all ecommerce site owners to make sure their customer service phone number is visible and accessible from every page, and especially on product pages, contact, orders forms, RFQ’s etc.

It’s a courtesy. It’s also a sign of credibility. However, its not total proof of customer service. Whatever you may think about phone numbers on web sites, I thought this story was a good illustration of what can happen, or not.

Put a phone number on your ecommerce site. The comments bring up some good points too.

The author writes, “I always recommend to clients that they put their phone number prominently on every page of their ecommerce sites. I believe it re-assures customers that if they have a problem, the customer can talk to someone.

I just proved to myself that it was the right advice for the wrong reason.”>

To User Persona or Not to User Persona…What is a User Persona?

Discussion or just learn more on the mysterious user persona in Book: The Persona Lifecycle

“Jeffrey Veen terms those personas unbacked by research “The designer’s imaginary friends.”

Ouch.

I was at THE MALL, (Definition: Where teenagers are most willing to exercise, pretend to be shopping and hang at Starbucks), the other day. Calmly and acting really cool so as not to be uncool with my even cooler daughter, Arielle, I handed over my credit card to the funky cool bracelets-jingling girl behind the counter.

Awaiting the transaction to finish, Arielle saw a form where she could fill out her information and the store would send her discounts, cool stickers and other stuff to impress a teenager. I didn’t want her filling it out and handing over all her private information so quickly without thinking about it first. As I was giving the mini-mom lecture, (In a cool way, of course. We were in THE MALL.), the girl behind the counter said,“Oh, this form is much safer than using the Internet. I won’t buy online because I hate entering my credit card and personal information.”

I refrained from saying anything to the store clerk, but I think I looked surprised. She was young and from the “Raised on the Internet” age group. And yet, she was afraid of it?

The Big Bad Wolf

In online privacy conversations with developers and from usability studies, I see and hear more conclusions that older persons, and those new to the Internet, are the ones who don’t trust the ‘Net. I wonder if the demographics are bigger than we thought?

One standard practice websites are getting away from is the one where you had to register first before being able to add to the cart. Nowadays, you can shop-till-you-drop on an ecommerce site and when you go to complete the shopping cart process, this is when you are asked for your personal information and often a login and password. It’s thought that at this point the visitor is ready to make a committment and complete the sale.

But, you would be wrong.

Shopping cart abandonment still occurs after registration in cases where shipping costs are now displayed for the first time, taxes are added, and any hidden costs like rental or shipping insurance are finally mentioned. These “surprise costs” were unknown and not shared with the site visitor until AFTER they entered their private information. Many are angered by this and abandon the sale.

Some online applications and shopping carts chase away people because the form can’t be filled out accurately due to how its designed (International usage being a biggie here). Some forms ask for FAX numbers as a requirement. Some ask for a phone number but offer no reason. (It’s usually for credit card purchases, but never assume everybody knows this.) Sometimes the phone number fields make no extra field for international calling codes, on sites where this is important for global sales. Some don’t indicate they don’t accept cash or checks until AFTER you’ve entered your personal information. These are all reasons to leave a site. They are also reasons to not feel warm and fuzzy about shopping online in general.

Most of this could be solved with user instructions that communicate, calm fears and create confidence that the next step is logical, considerate, and necessary.

Do You Trust The Internet?

The demographics in an online forums for website designers and online marketers may be skewed, but I wanted to get an update on how people feel about purchases online and entering private information into forms and shopping carts?

Do you enter bogus information to get a form to work? Do you shy away from entering your birthdate and credit card information? What do you find scary, even with trustmarks and signs of secure servers (and, do you believe they mean security or are there just for show?)

If you would like to share your thoughts or read the comments by those who have, please visit Usability and Trust: How do you feel about credit card and private info? (You don’t have to register to read, but to post, you do.)

One thoughtful, clever quote from the thread that I felt especially productive for designers is this one by Ammon Johns:

“Credibility and trust are given, or not, to the particular site, the particular form.”

Related article:

Contactless payment proves popular with users

“Philips and Visa International have released the results of a new usability study of near field communication (NFC) and contactless payment technology, which showed that consumers like the convenience, ease of use and ‘coolness’ of making transactions with their mobile phones.”

Jakob Nielsen has co-authored a new book with usability consultant, Hoa Loranger, called Prioritizing Web Usability. It is available for shipping now from Amazon.

The Table of Contents is extensive. What caught my eye, however, is Chapter Five, which is called “Search”. They present both the search engine results side, as well as the search engine optimization side. Included are sections called “Black-Hat SEO Tricks”, “Keyword Overuse Backfires”, “How Search Engines Determine a Site’s Reputation” and “Architectural SEO”. It’s interesting how the relationship between SEO/M and usability continues to intertwine.

For the user centered design angle, the usual suspects are covered such as information architecture and navigation (example: “Match the Site Structure to User Expectations”), writing for the web (example: “Summarize Key Points and Pare Down”), typography, creating product pages, page elements, (example: “Should You Design for Scrolling?”), usability findings and handling multi-media. Plus more. It’s 406 pages in all.

Prioritizing Web Usability comes in paperback. Amazon is listing it for $31.50.

“The best-selling usability guru is back and has revisited his classic guide, joined forces with Web usability consultant Hoa Loranger, and created an updated companion book that covers the essential changes to the Web and usability today. Prioritizing Web Usability is the guide for anyone who wants to take their Web site(s) to next level and make usability a priority! Through the authors’ wisdom, experience, and hundreds of real-world user tests and contemporary Web site critiques, you’ll learn about site design, user experience and usability testing, navigation and search capabilities, old guidelines and prioritizing usability issues, page design and layout, content design, and more!” — Source, Amazon’s Editorial Review