Monetate - Test, Target, Personalize

Halloween means different things to different people; but if you’re a retailer, why not think of this annual indulgence in masks and costumes as a reminder to review the user experience faced by shoppers at your online store? After all, nobody wants to enter the holiday shopping season with a spooky user interface that scares away potential customers.
Not that you would scare off your online shoppers on purpose, but the fact is, despite advances in Internet technology and web design, some online shopping experiences still feel more like a trick than a treat.

(BTW, Halloween night in America will be an hour longer than normal this year because Daylight Saving Time comes to an end at 2:00AM on the morning of Sunday, November 1–one hour is hardly enough time to do a full user interface review, but may be enough to ask friends and family to shop your store and give you unvarnished feedback on their experiences.)

What would be an example of a shopping treat that turned into a trick: I recently abandoned a shopping cart containing over $100 worth of purchases. Why? Because the store rejected my home address as “invalid.” After trying four different variations, I clicked out of that site feeling cheated and grumpy.

This particular interface failure is indicative of a wider phenomenon that I call “the input hack.” This is a web form that offers no help to the user yet responds to input errors with a series of unhelpful messages, leading to multiple attempts to complete the form in a tediously iterative and increasingly annoying process which, upon successful completion, feels like you’ve managed to hack your way into a classified computer system (when what you’ve actually accomplished is a much more modest goal: convincing an online store to accept your order).

So let’s be clear: Customer input should not be an exercise in trick or treat. Whenever a customer inputs data your response should be positive and helpful, whether or not the customer provided “correct” data. Do not, for example, respond with messages like this:

Email address improperly formatted or contains invalid or illegal characters.

I can almost hear Monty Python’s John Cleese delivering that error message in a voice dripping with disdain: “You bumbling idiot, what’s the matter with you? Can’t you even type an email address without screwing it up?” Furthermore, that type of error message provides no clue as to what a correct email address looks like.

Consider a more friendly and helpful alternative like this:

Sorry, we didn’t understand the email address you entered. Your email address should look like this: name@address.com. Please try again or click here for more help.

BTW, I borrowed the above example of a nasty input error message from this excellent article by Kevin Ertell; be sure to read it before reviewing your store’s user interface. Another article to check out as part of your user interface review is the excellent roundup of tools for improving your site on the new and improved Eisenberg blog.

One way to improve your shopping interface is to incorporate any data about the customer that you may have acquired. It’s obvious how this works with an existing customer who has created an account and signed in for the session, but if you’re doing traffic segmentation there’s likely to be plenty of data you can detect and act upon before, and outside of, that formal connection.

For example, if the visitor is new to your store you might want to be extra helpful about shopping procedures. The visitor location, determined by IP lookup, offers other clues about how your site should present itself, from time of day and current weather to possible language issues, and even rurality (for example, if they are not located in a metro area). The source of the visitor can also be instructive, giving useful hints as to their intentions. Did they arrive from an email link, affiliate referral, PPC ad, search result, and so on? With this information you can personalize the interface experience, making it more relevant and thus less frightening.

Finally, getting back to the store that spooked me with its rejection of my physical address: I sympathize with a retailer’s desire to validate my address, but automation of such tasks needs to be tempered with the understanding that no collection of data points can capture the complexities of reality (particularly when the U.S. Postal Service is involved). Our house is in a rural area where there is no mail delivery, so we pick up our mail at a Post Office which is located about a mile away, but in a different Zip code; however, both Fedex and UPS deliver packages to the house. Not a typical address situation, but we’re certainly not unique. My advice to retailers? Provide a means of confirming a non-conforming address. Don’t reject a paying customer out of hand.

Spooked by a retail interface? Startled by a surprisingly positive online shopping experience? Why not share your e-tail tricks or treats in a comment?

And remember,  Halloween 2009 in America is also time to put the clocks back one hour.