Everything online usability, marketing, and measurement
Archive for March, 2009
Speed and its role in the user experience
Even with the increase of bandwith that is made available with new cable and internet providers, I still frequently experience high load times for eCommerce businesses and Content Management Systems. You would think that the extra bandwith would start a downward trend in terms of load times, but it seems to not be the case.
The reasoning? Design practices and code pushes that are not completely optimized. Most open source systems, such as Magento for eCommerce or Joomla for content management, are preset with numerous elements of Javascript and database calls that are really not necessary. By disabling these components and by properly configuring compression settings on a server, you can get through the initial performance hurdles of these awesome applications.
Lets not forget how important speed is within the conversion equation. Between site search, checkout, product page design, promotions & mechandising – SPEED can be overlooked in site improvement efforts.
Sometimes all it takes is a great tool to assist an IT team in isolating improvement areas and driving metric increases from speed.
Here’s the best free one so far. Its called Pingdom, and literally provides a visual chart, almost like a poor mans GANTT Chart, of all the page elements and the time to load. This tool will show you the total number of URL calls that your page will make, the size of each call, the total number of objects and the breakdown of those objects.
No tool that I have ever seen, at least for free, provides this great information. Definitely worth 5 min of your time for a review…
Dropping the ball with cross browser testing
Today I felt like I was in 2000. As I navigated the web looking for a solution to a current need, I came across a website that was just technically unable to do what I wanted it to do.
Even though I was a member, and had previously interacted with the site many times before including conducting transactions, I was LOCKED out of the ability to use the site all because of the browser I was using.
This experience used to happen all the time in the history of the web, but now it happens rarely. I was assessing the video media at IStockphoto, a business that offers imagery and video for license.
In this case, I was browsing Istockphoto through Safari, a well known browser that is provided with all new Macs out of the box. Safari is third in the browser wars (maybe even 4th with the advent Chrome) but still is a distinct and sustainable player.
When finding the video I wanted to buy, I tried logging in numerous times with ID info that I knew was correct at Istockphoto. Nothing happened each time and there was no type of error messaging whatsoever. What a great user experience.
This just reiterates the need for your business to conduct cross-browser testing in the development and designing of new web properties. This need becomes even more paramount, as companies use client side scripts to manipulate and render content.
When crafting your next design, insist that your designers test all HTML versus the following browsers:
Internet Explorer (last 4 versions)
Firefox (last 4 versions)
Google Chrome (Current version)
Safari (Last 3 versions)
Following this practice will ensure that your site is not losing visitors from basic performance issues relating to functionality, it could drive your conversion rate upward if you have existing problems.