We want to share this usability story with you via the excellent Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering. It’s about a login form, a big ole e-commerce site, and a $300,000,000 usability “tweak”.

How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?

The problem wasn’t as much about the form’s layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product.

The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they’ll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?

User tests proved otherwise.  Here’s how they fixed it.

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

That’s a spicy meatball.  When it comes to path to purchase design, we at ENTERMEDIA advocate collecting as little information as necessary and never interfering with the end goal of completing a transaction.  People really don’t like filling out forms much, and associate this with signing up for marketing spam that clogs up their inbox (and wastes their time).  They will only put up with giving out personal information if they are confident they’ll be getting something good out of it…not just the purchased goods themselves but the convenience of buying online...and so you better make sure they find the transaction process on your e-commerce site easy and straightforward.  Don’t get in the way of what the user needs with what you think they want.

We published our first press release on the topic of how much we grew in 2008.

Pretty cool to see this get picked up by Yahoo news wire, and a good experience overall.

Read it here!

Our first location was a tiny space downtown on Congress Avenue. It served our basic needs for a while, but we needed something ENTERMEDIA could realistically grow in. Bryan heard about an office space above a grocery store in Hyde Park. We checked it out.

It was four times the size.  You could park your car for free.  Desks came with it.  It had a bathroom, a kitchenette…even a large conference room. The kicker was we could just barely afford it.  We knew we’d found our home, especially with Quack’s, Julio’s, Hyde Park Bar & Grill, Fresh Plus, Pronto and Asti Trattoria safely within reach to keep us and our clients well-caffeinated, well-fed and well-met. So we signed the lease, plugged in our gear and got to work. We had rent to pay, clients to talk to, websites to build. We could unpack later.

Three years went by.  We moved in more people, more desks, more machines, but never quite unpacked or fixed up the place like we intended.

Until this week, that is, when we began a long overdue office redesign project. The goal? To make our office more inviting and usable, and clear out the clutter. A designer was hired to give us an outsider’s perspective and plan of action for our budget. Then we got to work recycling old equipment, painting walls, replacing fixtures, hanging art and creating smarter work spaces. We can already see real progress, if not unmitigated success.  Sure it costs money and time but it’s also fun and good for morale…in other words, worth it.

What has been the most interesting realization is how similar our office remodeling project was to our client’s website redesign projects. It’s as if we were saying all the things our clients say when they finally decide they can’t tolerate their old site anymore. Like our redesign clients, our motivation was to take control…to move forward…to reinvest, realign and refine.

“It’s something we’ve been meaning to do for years.”
“It’s just way too cluttered.”
“We’ve changed a lot.”
“We’ve grown so much.”
“We want to modern up our look.”
“We want to project a more professional image.”
“We can afford to do it.”
“We can’t afford not to do it.”

That last one was the one we couldn’t deny anymore.  We agreed it was about our customers. What impression did they form when they came to our office? What did we hope they’d think?

It was time to redesign.

Smashing Magazine did a very nice showcase on designing search boxes last month. You might think the search box is a pretty straightforward affair.  Sometimes it is, but maybe it shouldn’t be considering many people prefer using the search box to drill down for specific information, particularly on content heavy sites.

The article sums up the need for intuitive search box design quite well:

In practice, websites tend to grow over time, adding new content and, more importantly for us, adding new navigation options, such as additional content sections. However, these new content islands do not necessarily fit the whole information architecture that was well-designed and thoroughly structured when the website was initially designed.

Enter the search box, and we begin to separate the wheat from the chaff:

The box must be clearly visible, quickly recognizable and easy to use. One may think that the search box doesn’t need a design; after all, it’s just two simple elements: an input field and submit button. How much harm could a poor design do? Well, there are a number of things that can go wrong; for instance, the text displayed in the input field may be hard to read, or the input field may be too short or too long…Some designers even prefer a minimalist solution and don’t provide a submit button at all: the “Return” key has to be used instead.

Consider it the designer’s challenge…how to avoid reinventing this wheel.

Drupal is an open source content management platform that we frequently use to build professional business websites, personal blogs, community-driven sites and even ecommerce websites. Here is a great summary of features Drupal brings to the table.

Why do we love Drupal?

• Drupal is modular and extensible
• Drupal is quality-coded and standards-based
• Drupal is fully operational with Apache, PHP and either MySQL or Postgresql.
• Drupal is open source and licensed under the GPL
• Drupal is easy to use for web designers, web developers, admins and end users
• Drupal is effortlessly collaborative, scalable, and search engine friendly

We tell our clients that Drupal is hands down the best CMS platform for websites that have a lot of content or require frequent content updates. We continue to be impressed by its simplicity, elegance and power. Drupal is also very intuitive to work with after learning a few central concepts. We can teach our clients how to update their own content, change their page titles or rearrange their site navigation in no time.

Nick Lewis is ENTERMEDIA’s “Head Drupal Chef”. Nick is an acknowledged expert in the Drupal development community, a member of the Drupal Association, and we consider him a great asset to our web design and development offering here in Austin, Texas.

Ever wondered how “The Google” turns your search for austin web design into entermedianow.com?  Google does a nice job of explaining how it works in simple language here:

Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes, and serves the web

You can familiarize yourself with Google’s own stated guidelines for helping its machines find, index and rank your site.  Some of these are pretty obvious, like make sure you don’t have any broken links or erroneous html, and try to keep number of links on any page under 100.  Others can’t be stated often enough:

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Be sure you don’t run afoul and get kicked down or out of Google’s search results.  The best way to avoid trouble is to follow this advice:  “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.” Optimization is perfectly fine and a great idea, but don’t get carried away trying to game the system.  There’s better and easier ways to rank your own Google-friendly website, and here’s more good news:  we believe there’s no more qualified SEO expert for your site than you yourself.