

Strategies: 'User Experience' upgrade helps website improve sales

In the retail world, the success of a physical store relies not just on what's sold and for what price, but also on how much consumers enjoy the shopping experience. Store managers focus on this experience since they understand that happy shoppers stay longer, purchase more often and are more likely to return.

Store managers use surveys, research firms and other surveillance to analyze data on who's visiting, how they navigate the store, how long they browse before buying, what sections they visit and in what order, and whether they interact with in-store promotions.

The goal is to identify and remove as many obstacles to a sale as possible. Obstacles could be obvious ones, such as a confusing store layout or not enough checkout counters, to more subtle ones, such as poor lighting or annoying music.

Stores have optimized the in-store shopping experience for decades, but its application to online stores is new. It's a rapidly emerging field called "user experience" (UX), which refers to the emotions a computer user experiences when visiting a website.

Good UX is vital if you run a website, since it takes merely a distracted mind plus one simple click for a shopper to abandon your store. Indeed, Forrester Research reports that on average, 97 percent of all online retail visitors don't make a purchase. Unfortunately for online retailers, the Internet is a perfect tool for browsing.

Savvy retailers now understand that improving their UX can dramatically enhance their bottom line. Decreasing that 97 percent average by one point, for example, results in a 33 percent increase in sales.

UX is becoming a must-have title (and sometimes entire department) for online retailers. But they face the challenge of finding someone with UX skills, which tend to be a mix of research, psychology, marketing, web design and analytics.

"Finding a UX professional that fits the specific needs of a business can be frustrating," said Josh Tyson, managing editor of UX Magazine. "While the concepts, processes and practices behind user-centered design have been around for many years, the field is relatively immature. There's not a lot of agreement within the web community as to what a UX person should do, and companies new to the world of UX are still unsure what to look for."