Online Shopping Cart Design Activity

What's the Point?

Analyzing an online shopping experience is a good way to get your feet wet with usability and interface design concepts.

How's It Done?

The term "online shopping cart" refers to the part of the shopping experience that includes registration, adding items to the cart, checking out, paying, and following up, e.g. finding out whether your item has shipped. It does not include the way you browse products or services on the site iteself.

Shopping cart design is difficult because of several tradeoffs:

• Vendors want as much info about you as possible, but they don't want to scare you away with a huge registration form.
• Vendors want to know about people who visit, even if they don't buy, so some make you register to even browse products, but others don't because you'd never do it.
• Some vendors offer many value-added options, e.g. how fast to ship, whether to gift wrap, whether to wait until a backordered item is present to ship everything at once, etc, but they don't want to overwhelm you with these.
• Vendors want to persuade you to impulse-buy ("People who bought your item also bought this other item"), so they want to communicate these messages to you, but not overwhelm you.

You Do It!

Imagine you're working for a company that wants to revamp its online shopping cart. Your manager asks for your advice.

Compare two online shopping experiences. You don't have to buy anything, but register and get to the point of checkout on two different sites (or you current shopping accounts you already have).

Based on your experience, create several criteria that you would use to evaluate an online shopping cart. Criteria might include the number of clicks required, or the ease of removing items from the cart, or whatever you think is important. Remember to include some affective criteria as well -- How did it feel to shop?

You'll be giving your manager these criteria to use in evaluating your company's new shopping cart.

Spend 30-45 minutes on this.

Explain It!

Write an activity post that includes:

• Which two shopping sites did you explore?
• Your thoughts about them generally, in 50-100 words.
• Your criteria by which you think shopping carts should be evaluated.

Now Think Again

Just for fun, if you want, visit Command Line Amazon to see what you think of that shopping experience. It's designed for people who like the command line and want no ads, etc. It actually works--it's running on the Amazon databases and you can purchase items. An interface on the opposite end of the spectrum is the RoofStudio site from Mini Cooper.

Also check out Drag and Drop Shopping Cart.

And just for fun, a web site that gets rid of all clicks (besides the start button): Don't Click It

Bad Usability Activity - Homework

What's the Point?

Good usability smooths the use of any system, and with physical systems or medical instruments, can sometimes be a life and death issue.

Sadly, it's all too easy to design something with bad usability.

How's It Done?

Whenever you're presented with a system, you can analyze its usability using a variety of criteria.

Don Norman describes several principles to follow when designing a usable system or product:

• Offer affordances
• Offer a good conceptual model
• Make things visable
• Make a good mapping
• Offer feedback

Others, such as Dix and Sharp, Rogers, & Preece, offer usability goals, such as:

• Effective – Complete, Accurate
• Efficient – Speed, Effort
• Easy to learn – Predictable, Consistent
• Easy to remember - Memorability
• Safe to Use - Safety from injury
• Error tolerant – Prevention, Recovery
• Engaging – Pleasant, Satisfying

You Do It!

Find two interfaces or websites or physical items with bad usability.

Make screengrabs / pics. If you're really gutsy, mockup what a "fixed" version would look like.

NOTE: Pictures of usability in the real world (as opposed to screen-based pics) work best when there's a person involved, e.g. show a hand turning a knob or a person in the picture. Including the person adds scale cues and a little about intent.

You can work in pairs.

Explain It!

Write a blog post that includes:

• A picture of the bad usability
• Your description of the task the user wants to do
• What’s wrong
• Your thoughts on what would be better
• Brief analysis (100 words or less) that references at least one principle / goal of usability from the How It's Done above.

Now Think Again

Check out the Bad Usability Calendar.