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Persuade senior management to buy in to usability/user experience?

Pore over your log files [web analytics] and be prepared to point out the places where 

users are ‘bailing out’, along with cogent arguments as to why, mentioning things like 

your lovely,  design-  award-  winning Flash  animated-  splash screen that takes a minute 

to load and does nothing towards selling the product.

Then, convert those  bail-  outs into dollars:

We are losing 20% of our customers before they ever even enter the site because 

of our splash screen. Last year, our sales were $140,000,000. If we hadn’t lost all 

these people, we could have realised an additional $11,420,000. Total lost profit: 

Around $750,000. A single HCI designer could have prevented that, at a savings of 

around $700,000 dollars. We also will no longer have to put out release x.01, x.1, 

and x.2 every time we come out with a new design, because the design will be right. 

That would save us millions more in engineering resources.

Companies not only save millions by having HCI talent available to them; they often 

move back from the brink of extinction.

HCI can be a no-brainer to senior management if the case is made clearly and 

expressed in terms they understand – money.

Failing buy-in, do it anyway. All that’s needed is a broom closet and a couple of 

tables.

Forget about video. Just see if people can use your site. A single test with a single 

user in a broom closet can be such an  eye-  opener, it can change the course of a whole 

project. (Of course, even with qualitative testing, 20 or 30 users, over time, are better.)

Even a really bad designer, with sufficient  user-  testing, will eventually be able to 

cobble together a decent design – the infinite number of monkeys theory – the worst 

crime is to not test at all.

Also consider becoming an HCI designer yourself. If you’re concerned enough to 

petition management, you have the most important prerequisite – you care.

Source: E-consultancy (2007).

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Part 3  Implementation

required to produce a  customer-  centric online presence is given by Alison Lancaster, at the 

time the head of marketing and catalogues at John Lewis Direct and currently Marketing 

Director at Charles Tyrrwhitt (

www.ctshirts.co.uk

), who says:

A good site should always begin with the user. Understand who the customer is, how 

they use the channel to shop, and understand how the marketplace works in that cat-

egory. This includes understanding who your competitors are and how they operate 

online. You need continuous research, feedback and usability testing to continue to 

monitor and evolve the customer experience online. Customers want convenience and 

ease of ordering. They want a site that is quick to download,  well-  structured and easy 

to navigate.

You can see that creating effective online experiences is a challenge since there are many 

practical issues to consider which we present in Figure 11.10. This is based on a diagram by 

de Chernatony (2001), who suggested that delivering the online experience promised by a 

brand requires delivering rational values, emotional values and promised experience (based 

on rational and emotional values). The factors that influence the online customer experience 

can be presented in a pyramid form of success factors as is shown in Figure 11.10 (the dif-

ferent success factors reflect current best practice and differ from those of de Chernatony). 

The diagram also highlights the importance of delivering service quality online, as has 

been indicated by Trocchia and Janda (2003). Research by Christodoulides et al. (2006) has 

tested the importance of a range of indicators of online brand equity for online retail and 

Figure 11.10

Different factors impacting the online customer experience

Content

and search