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.

The International Parking Meters Study by the UXalliance

Partners and associates from the UXalliance conducted the international usability study of parking meters to coincide with the theme of "transportation" for World Usability Day 2008. The International Parking Meters Study explored interface and interaction design of parking meters around the world and examined different parking meter interfaces and the common problem of designing an interface to accommodate a broad range of users trying to achieve multiple tasks.


Using parking meters is an everyday activity for many, and one that should be intuitive enough not require much thought from the user. The International Parking Meters Study provides valuable insight into how and where interface and interaction design can be applied to avoid potential annoyance and unnecessary costs. The International Parking Meters Study is a good opportunity to learn what's designed well and how to detect and fix existing shortcomings of the parking meter.


Read the full Int'l Parking Meters Study or visit the UXa website.

Using the SUS Questionnaire to Evaluate Subjective Satisfaction with Handsets in Out-of-the-box Testing by Sven Koerber, SirValUse, GmbH (Germany)

Based on the results of 27 quantified usability tests of mobile phones, usability professionals from UXalliance partner SirValUse GmbH (Germany) are able to provide data points based on this research. The data points provide an understanding of what to expect from SUS (System Usability Scale) questionnaires in walk-up-and-use testing.

Created in December 1986 for the evaluation of office systems, SUS continues to be valuable. This one-page, ten-item questionnaire written by Sven Körber, Director Customer Experience, SirValUse GmbH has proven a useful and consistent tool to capture subjective satisfaction with mobile phones, even with small samples and when time is short in sessions. As a rule of thumb, scoring higher than 70 on a scale from 0-100 can be interpreted as providing relatively high perceived usability for mobile phones.

Read the full article visit the UXalliance website.

What’s Driving the Mini Cooper? Not the User Experience by User Centric, Inc. (US)

User Experience professionals from UXalliance partner, User Centric, Inc. recently conducted an evaluation of the Mini Clubman's dashboard user interface. A good portion of the 'eval' focused on the Mini's powerful and feature-rich audio system.

Most of the controls for the audio system and the car's computerized settings are situated near the oversized analog speedometer. Although most controls are well-labeled (including 'Audio' for switching modes and 'Main Menu' for navigation), the system suffers from an inefficient layout of controls and poor error recovery.

The main selection dial for the audio system is located just below the FM tuner buttons and could be easily mistaken for the separate volume control, which sits below the CD player outside of the main area of interaction. This volume control seems disconnected from the rest of the audio system.

The system has direct iPod and iPhone connectivity providing users versatility and flexibility with inputs for both auxiliary and USB cables that can double as device chargers. However, when we tried using the iPhone in both AUX and USB modes, a message read "This accessory [cable] is not made to work with the iPhone". The Mini's user manual says that the cable is only made to work with some iPhone models, but it does not say which ones it works with or where to find out which models it does work with. It is important for users to be able to recover from errors and build trust in the systems that they use.

Read the full article or visit the UXalliance website.

Travel in the Economic Downturn by Xperience Consulting (Spain)

Weakening in the economy has not affected international travel and number of airline passengers, according to the International Air Transport. International travel has risen 9.3 percent in March 2009, compared to the previous year. The internet is the most widely used tool for searching travel options. Airline and hotel websites are optimizing their sites to meet demands and improve the functionality of their sites.

UXalliance partner, Xperience Consulting conducted the expert usability evaluation of online travel agencies and hotel web-sites. Xperience Consulting found people traveling in the economic downturn are more selective, tend to analyze options more, and looks for deals. The study explores opinions, preferences and behaviors of consumers, plus analysis of search strategies for booking travel.

Read the complete report on the UXalliance web-site.

Fashion: A Useful Usability Placebo by Andrew Swartz, Managing Consultant - Serco Usability Services (UK)

Let’s swallow hard and say something difficult but true. It may feel like a dietician being forced to discuss the merits of chocolate cake, but still it has to be said. So here it is, straight and clear, right at the beginning: sometimes fashion is more important than usability.

Why is that so difficult to say? Maybe it’s because we’ve spent decades trying to get developers and designers to pay any attention to the user’s needs whatsoever. Not just that, but also we’ve been building a profession from scratch, cost justifying our very existence, and fighting boneheaded ideas, such as all you need to do to fix a bad interface is to make one horrible screen slide elegantly into the next. So it is difficult to admit that simple usability is only one component of the users’ entire experience—an important component of course, but still just one of many.

Here’s a story I’ve told before. A while back, we studied two versions of a mobile phone Menu screen. The first showed 12 icons, each with a name underneath it. The second showed the same 12 icons but without names. All the people who tried the two versions were much more successful using the version with the names. But they greatly and unanimously preferred the version without the names. They weren’t fooling themselves either. They knew they were more successful with one version but preferred the other. Why? The version without the names was more fashionable‐looking at the time than the version with names. And because the version without the names wasn’t too difficult to use, fashion trumped usability.

To read the full publication go to the UXa website - Reports & Publications

Google Health vs. Microsoft HealthVault: Consumers Compare Online PHR Applications by User Centric, Inc. (US)

User Centric, Inc. (US) recently conducted an independent usability study of two existing online personal health record (PHR) applications, Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. (Neither Google nor Microsoft commissioned or participated in this study in any manner.)

While participants’ overall evaluations were certainly influenced by features, security, privacy and trust, it is critical to note that their major difficulties with both applications - and their strongest criticisms - were related to the user experience.

During this study, 30 participants representing patients completed key tasks using both PHR application and provided qualitative feedback, ratings and preference data on five specific dimensions: Overall usability, utility (usefulness of features), security, privacy and trust. Participants were generally new to the concept of PHR applications.

During the study, they completed seven tasks using both the Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault applications which included three application-specific tasks that explored each application’s unique features.

Based on this usability study, User Centric has identified several guidelines to be included in a working model for PHR interfaces that facilitates user adoption. The complete complimentary study by User Centric, Inc. is available.

The Multi-touch Interface Challenge by Tim Semen of The Hiser Group (Australia)

Gesture-based interfaces are the way of the future – but it could be a path set with user barriers if we don’t identify a set of intuitive and consistent gestures for standard commands.

Gesture-based interfaces have been around almost as long as computers have had displays. Light pens first appeared in the late 1950’s (predating even the trackball and mouse) and were briefly popular in the 1980’s. The Palm device line was extremely popular from the late 1990’s (even though they came with a stylus you only managed to keep for a week before it was never seen again!). And in recent years, my wife has been wowing her students with the Tablet PC she uses daily for teaching class.

However, those devices simply allow you to poke, tap, or scribble gestures on a fairly standard interface of windows, icons, menus and pointers. As useful as these attempts were to provide a more natural interaction, they did little to bridge the “computer world” with the “real world”.

In the computer world we’ve largely been reduced to poking at things with one finger at a time through the on-screen pointer, whereas in the real world we’ve learned to use all ten digits and both hands together. Consequently, we’ve never been able to signal our intent to computers using the full range of our capabilities.

Perhaps that’s why they’ve never felt very natural to us.

Check out the full article The multi-touch interface challenge