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. Read the rest of this entry »
David Brussin
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