Why are customers 'checking out' before actual checkout?

E-marketer announced this week that nearly 60% of US online retailers are seeing cart abandonment rates of over 20% this year. A study by PayPal and comScore found 45% of US online shoppers had abandoned shopping carts multiple times in just three weeks.

Reasons for cart abandonment vary and some are due to usability problems. Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade has seen in Brazilian usability testing that many consumers abandon the purchase because they are stuck in the registration forms. They cannot register on the merchant website due to usability problems found on the forms.

What problems do you see in your country?

User Experience in the Contact Center by User Centric, Inc (US)

User experience can have a profound impact on how agents perform with contact center systems. User Centric, Inc. (US) released a white paper presenting successful techniques for creating optimal contact center user interfaces. Enhancing human performance with a more usable call center user interface can greatly influence the bottom line by enabling better staff utilization, reducing handle times, decreasing errors, and increasing sales offers. For instance, some things as simple as typography, such as the use of ALL CAPS, slows down users’ reading times by 12%, increases error rates, and takes important time away from serving customers.

This white paper will help readers to understand:

Unique design considerations for the contact center environment.
How to research the items that are in most need of change.
What makes designing for contact centers different from user-centered design process.
The ramifications of design changes within this particular domain.

Read the white paper or visit the UXalliance website.

The Affective Evaluation For Grip In Camcorders by ThinkUser (South Korea)

Camcorders are used for a relatively long time compared with other devices such as remote-controls or power tools.

In addition, the issue of stability when holding it during operation is critical for obtaining high quality video recordings, which is the ultimate goal of the users.

Changyoung Oh, Director at ThinkUser (South Korea) examined the factors affecting grips and what is necessary to provide useful guidelines for the design and production of camcorders.

Read the full paper or visit the UXalliance website.

Usability Effects Nature by Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade (Brazil)

What happens when 30-40% of attempts to buy online fail because websites are too complicated to use? In many cases, the consumer abandons the virtual shopping experience and heads to the store.

But, what in the world does this have to do with nature? When a company substitutes an online for paper, it not only saves money from buying paper, but reduces the ecological footprint of production (forest conservation, energy and water consumption, transport, etc).

If websites were easy to use, much more people would do operations online in their homes or offices saving many trips. Read the full paper by Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade or visit the UXalliance website.

Brazilian E-commerce Product Pages - A Study by Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade (Brazil)

E-commerce in Brazil is developing quickly as the public increasingly seeks to purchase products and services through the Internet.

In 2008 online sales grew 30% and reached $4.2 billion. Specialists at Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade feel the growth could be even higher if Brazilian e-commerce websites adhered to usability rules on their product pages.

Three specialists at Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade visited 15 major Brazilian e-commerce websites and analyzed pages of similar and typical website specifi­c products. All 15 websites violated basic usability principles and as a result are losing sales. Specialists from Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade have compiled results and recommendations based on this study.

Go the UXalliance website or view the full report.

10th IA Summit Gets a Shakeup by User Intelligence (Netherlands)

Time to let go and move on…

“Information architecture does not exist as a profession. As an area of interest and inquiry? Sure. As your favorite part of your job? Absolutely. But it's not a profession. […]

There's no such thing as an interaction designer either. There are no information architects. There are no interaction designers. There are only, and only ever have been, user experience designers.” Jesse James Garrett – Closing Keynote at the IA Summit 2009.
The theme of this year’s seminal IA Summit was ‘Expanding our Horizons’ and it lived up to this motif in some unexpected ways.

Read the full paper or visit the UXalliance website.

What Microsoft Blend is Missing by UIDesign Group (Russia)

XAML/Blend technology promises interaction designers an improved level of control over the results of their work. It enables interaction designers to develop interfaces for the end product that are very close to the initial concept. However, this technology changes the habitual way of designers’ work and requires additional skills. UXalliance partner, UIDesign Group (Russia) explores the in's and out's of Microsoft Blend © - what is missing and does it really allow for developing complex interfaces?

Read the full paper (PDF 3 MB) or visit the UXalliance website.