Usability Notes - by Chris Baker

Cannibalism! Pirates! Beautiful Princess!

Just have a guess - how may professional conversations do you think I've had about cannibalism since I joined the publishing industry in 1993?

Can't give you an exact number, but the answer is much more than zero. Not that publishers are prone to having a barbecue with someone from Marketing roasting on a spit - the conversations I am recalling are a risk of introducing electronic as well as print formats. "Cannibalism" is shorthand for this concern: "What if start publishing electronic formats as well as print, and the only outcome is that people switch from one format to the other, giving us no additional sales, but the additional costs of making two formats?"

A number of factors mean this is not simple to sort out. The market might include:

• Customers who will only buy one format and would certainly have bought print if that was all there. Any sale of an electronic format is at the expense of a print one
• Customers who buy both formats (when I worked at OUP during the late nineties, we were pleased to find a good number of customers wanting both the printed Oxford Textbook, and the CD-ROM. One was for searching, the other was for long reads, and for having impressive spines on the Consultant's shelf)
• Customers who will only buy the publication in electronic format (and buy a rival publication if yours is only available in print). Publishers tend to feel they are protected from this at least a bit by the "Content is King" argument - i.e. competition is perhaps more likely to be about who has the best textbook, or best story, rather than format being the key feature. Some other factors may apply, though: in some markets (e.g. business reports) the customer needs the information NOW and will settle for a second-best product if that is all that is available within the deadline.

To further confuse the picture, electronic formats can easily be made into products that have no direct print equivalent. For example, what was once a printed book can be amalgamated with other content into a bookshelf or library, or it can be disaggregated into smaller pieces of content to be sold individually.

The differences don't stop at Production, either -  if you have electronic formats, new sales channels and marketing oportunitiesbecome available - for example it becomes much cheaper to offer a free sample or trial subscription. You can try to sell via affilliates. Electronic formats are cheap to store and distribute and so it may be practical to keep a "long tail"  of publications in electronic format beyond the point where it would be uneconomic to keep stock in a warehouse. Also to distribute them to markets where it would be uneconomic to ship paper products.

Want more reasons to be confused? - add the prospects of piracy (arguably easier when he digitally-pirated copy is the same quality as the original, rather than a grotty photocopy), and the debate about whether piracy is a dead loss, or whether Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy (for all but those products where the "obscurity" problem has already been solved; and for whom the pirates are now parasites only).

Hey, cannibals and pirates all in one post! Basically, we're never going to sort this out by a priori reasoning. There are too many unknowns for that - it's about as likely as me working in a Beautiful Princess into this post, so we can rescue her from the pirates and cannibals and then live happily ever after.

Oh, all right then, just for you, I'll finish this post in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure book...

The track leads up to the sheer cliffs, and with the pirates and cannibals closing in, you and the  Beautiful Princess draw  your swords and stand back to back determined to sell your content dearly.
"You'll never eat me alive!" she shouts at the cannibals
"And I'm not going to be Jolly Rogered!!" you challenge the pirates.
[One moment - aren't Beautiful Princesses meant to be grateful and supportive and not to flare their nostrils sarcastically? ...]

• Do you assume that the cannibals are not a significant threat? To see data from O'Reilly (computer book publisher) see Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.
• Do you think that the pirates only want to impose progressive taxation? See Tim O'Reilly's thoughts on the matter.
• Do you think the existing model of copyright is breaking down? See Content, Cory Doctorow's essays on the subject (informed in part by his experiences of routinely publishing a free electronic version of his science fiction novels).
• Do you grab the Princess's hand and jump into the sea (this being what you do in stories like this when at the top of a sheer cliff, just as you climb into the ventilation shafts of a Secret Base)? Go to X
• Or do you want to fight the lot of them? Go to Y
  

Dispatch from the Browser wars

When developing websites, it is useful to know which browsers your customers will be using. The best guide is your own usage stats, but if you don't have those, or want to see how your customers compare with a wider sample, StatCounter publish figures based on "aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites." They have a nice graphing tool you can use to look at the browser war in different areas and over different time periods.

Worldwide, 19 May- 17 June Statcounter has IE7 still ahead  (just under 32%) with Firefox 3 close behind.


Firefox is ahead of IE7 in Europe (36% to IE7's 27%):

IE7 has a bigger share in North America (38% to 28%)

IE8 has yet to get above 10% (has just reached thsi in North America, yet to get to 8% in Europe)

How people find a blog

eMarketer have an interesting survey "Blog Reading is a Free Floating Affair" studying how people discover blogs. The study (survey of about 200 respondents) showed that 67% followed links from other blogs. Recommendations came second at 23%, then search engines 20% then blog search engines at 5% (multiple responses were allowed).

One hypothesis from this might be that blogs are read by blog people who search them out in blog-ish fashion. This is also a possible conclusion from the data about the popularity of the Dilbert blog and newsletter that I reported a while ago. If so this would be something you'd want to consider before making a business blog - do you /do you not want to appeal to blog readers?

But I'm not convinced that the data justify eMarketer's subheading "Thinking of promoting a blog through search? Don't bother. ". Most of the respondents in the survey were finding blogs for entertainment (66%) and for personal interests (43%); with only 33% finding blogs for education/information and 12% for work or business (multiple responses were allowed to this question). It may be that they were looking at a lot of blogs that were run by individuals. And getting links from other blogs is probably the easiest way for individuals to spread the word about their blogs. There are several factors to this:

• Comment and trackback features allow a blog owner to make their own inbound links from other blogs (to an extent, at least)
• There is often an easy-to-find person behind the blog - in my experience at least, emailing that person (I liked your blog and have written about it/linked to it) is quite likely to get an interested response, and perhaps a link  (like this link to me, one of my first, I think). Getting a link from other kinds of websites can be much more of an effort ("when the webmaster gets around to it")
• Blogging seems easily to lead to posts along the lines that "I read this on the web and I think it is very true/complete tosh because..."

By contrast, you have to bother to register for search engines, or be kindly linked to from a page that already gets visits from robots. I wonder how many individual bloggers would find it useful to run paid ads on the engines?

So the survey data may reflect the ways in which many blogs find it easy or convenient to form links (or what happens when someone concentrates on writing their blog and doesn't make any real effort to market it). I'm not at all sure it shows that search doesn't work. My own blog typically gets more referrals from organic Google listings than from any single other source (that is Google is less that 50%  of referrals, but is the biggest single slice of the pie. I should say that I do not expend much effort and no money at all in marketing my blog, it being mostly for my own professional development.

Shopping cart abandonment benchmarks

In this article I review some choice statistics about shopping cart abandonment rates from a talk by Anne Holland of MakretingSherpa, Etail Speech Take II: Three Ways to Lower Shopping Cart Abandons Based on MarketingSherpa Research.

Anne's talk is data from the  Ecommerce Benchmark Survey, January 2007 – a survey with 1,923 respondents. Across all those respondents, average shopping cart abandonment rates were 52.1% in 2006 (i.e. 52.1% of customers who entered the shopping cart system never made it to the checkout). This was an improvement on 59.8% in 2005. As usual, the average of these things is not much of a benchmark in itself - the results for 2006 fell into a normal curve where the high end of the normal range was 80% abandoned carts and the low end was 12.5%. This presumably reflects the fact that we are not always in the industry of "businesses who sell things using the Internet"  - sometimes we are, but there are a lot of concerns specific to a particular sector: buying a car or a computer from a website may not be the same thing as buying a book or CD. To give a practical example, if you are concerned with a site that has a 50% abandonment rate, you don't necessarily know whether you are doing well against your competitors with their 80% rate, or are a real slouch against their 12% rate.

The survey respondents were asked what new improvements they were trying and what worked best. A top tactic for big sites was to introduce a "bill me later" feature - 17% of big ecommerce sites had done this in 2006. MarketingSherpa have a case study with Newegg which in various "bill me later" features were taken up by 10% of customers. But these customers were the big spenders, with much bigger shopping carts than average.

The next way to improve was (once again, as in the 2006 report) by testing the shopping cart. Once again, this was the thing that most respondents reported as being most effective to get a return on ROI. Apparently small or subtle changes, such as changes to the text on buttons could turn out to be important. Coming second and third (again as in 2005) were improving internal search, and improving site copy. So these look like good areas to review in a shopping cart improvement project.

Tactic number 3 was to send email(s) to customers who had abandoned carts (of course you can only do this if you have their email addresses and the relevant permission to use it). 73% of respondents said this was an effective   improvement. A case study with Limoges Jewelry showed that the technique could be effective even if the emails were a simple generic one (rather than a customized text): Limoges found this got a 28.77% conversion  (though this was only reached after a few months)

Do customers desert a site if it takes longer than 4 seconds to load?

In this post, a closer look at a memorable and alarming statistic leads to a more general discussion of things that annoy website customers, and a bit about the questionnaire versus user trials controversy...

Sometimes I see a statistic that I know I'm going to see quoted a lot. An example is one from eMarketer in an article called Online Retailers Face Four-Second Barrier

Now, as the all-important online holiday shopping season nears, and the competition for online shoppers increases, a new report from Akamai Technologies advises e-tailers to be on their toes — because a few heartbeats can make the difference between a sale and a lost customer.

The research shows that four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before abandoning one retail site and moving on to another.

"The critical takeaway from this research is that online shoppers not only demand quality site performance, they expect it," said Brad Rinklin of Akamai. "Four seconds is the new benchmark by which a retail site will be judged, which leaves little room for error for retailers to maintain a loyal online customer base."

The article is quoting a new report by Akami and Jupiter Research (registration is needed to view the report). It looks like a good enough piece of work the methodology section of the paper explains:

"In April 2006, JupiterResearch designed and fielded a survey to online consumers selected randomly from the Ipsos US online consumer panel. A total of 1,058 individuals responded to the survey. Respondents were asked approximately 15 closed-ended questions about their behaviors, attitudes, and preferences as they relate to buying and researching products and services online. Respondents received an e-mail invitation to participate in the survey with an attached URL linked to the Web-based survey form. The samples were carefully balanced by a series of demographic and behavioral characteristics to ensure that they were representative of the online population. Demographic weighting variables included age, gender, household income, household education, household type, region, market size, race, and Hispanic ethnicity. Additionally, JupiterResearch took the unconventional step of weighting the data by AOL usage, online tenure, and connection speed (broadband versus dial-up), three key determinants of online behavior. Balancing quotas are derived from JupiterResearch’s Internet Population Model, which relies on US Census Bureau data and a rich foundation of primary consumer survey research to determine the size, demographics, and ethnographics of the US online population. The survey data are fully applicable to the US online population within a confidence interval of plus or minus three percent."

When I hear the "new 4-second rule" being quoted at me, though I will try to remember the following bits from the actual report:

1. "Thirty-three percent of consumers shopping via a broadband connection will wait no more than four seconds for a Web page to render."  (From Fig 3 of the report:30% of broadband customers said they would would wait 5-6 seconds, and a further 38% would wait more than 6 seconds. Only 19% of dial-up customers said they would leave if a single page took longer than 4 seconds to render).
2. From Fig 2 of the report, in which respondents were asked to remember what annoyed them about their last unsatisfactory e-tail experience, slow pages was the third biggest annoyance (quoted by 33%) compared with high prices (44%) and shipping/handling issues (39%). Annoyance at the need to register, or "website was frustrating/confusing" came joint fourth.
3. In Fig 5, customers are asked how they would react to their bad experience, and this was correlated with what they complained about - interestingly, there isn't much difference in the reaction of people who remember a crash from those who found the site too slow or confusing (or who found the checkout process too slow). The most likely reaction was to visit the site less often, "purchase from another online retailer" comes third. I'd have thought that a crash was worse than slow pages, but maybe not.

Slow-loading pages is of course not a new "annoyance" the eMarketer article quotes a 2005 study (Taylor Nelson Sofres) in which slow pages came out as the 5th most popular thing to be ranked by customers as "extremely annoying" (the top 4 were pop-up ads (84%); requiring installation of extra software to view the site (72%); Dead links (66%) and requirement to register  before viewing site (61%). I can't think of anyone who says slow pages are good per se. As usual there's a trade-off some sites continue to have slow pages because they reckon the page will work so well when you do see it. 

So while having slow pages is not good, it is not quite the stark 4 seconds and you are dead! But I'm going to hear this figure a lot because while it may not be completely right it is very memorable enough for a sort of e-marketer's 1066 And All That. At best I guess it is a rule of a thumb that has been dipped in a pinch of salt.

Actually what seems more realistic to me is an idea from Steve Krug's book "Don't Make me Think" - imagine the customer arrives at your website with a reservoir of patience and good will to you and your business. The initial size of this reservoir depends on a lot of factors, including their previous experiences with you, their overall mood and to-do list that day, how motivated they are to do stuff on your site and so on. Their "good will level" goes up or down according to how the site treats them - but the point at which goodwill=0 and they say "aw the heck with it!" is going to vary.

This is probably the point at least to mention that old grip that some usability study folks have with questionnaire data - that "self-reported claims are unreliable" (sometimes this is said to be "Nielsen's first rule").  That is - what people say they thought or happened is not always how it seems if you watch them. This is one of the interesting objections raised on a discussion at cre8asite about whether it was worth putting questionnaires on a website. The "don't bother" camp seemed to win that debate on that site, a bit to my surprise - I'd have thought that what customers perceive as reality is as interesting as what someone else perceives their reality is....