While researching on ways to improve the online shopping experience, I came across the following article:
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/92/shoppingcart.html
The article returns to review findings they arrived at in 2002.
One thing I noticed was the first recommendation:
Calling a Shopping Cart anything but a Shopping Cart.
The article writers do clarify in the second paragraph that it is ok to call a shopping cart by another name as long as customers are familiar with the term. eg. shopping trolley is a more suitable alternative name in the U.K.
The seventh recommendation:
Make it easy to remove items from the shopping cart.
A lot of shopping carts out there require the user to enter zero to remove an item. The article does offer the minus sign, the X sign and the trash can sign. I personally wouldn't offer the x button and find the minus sign or trash can sign a much better alternative.
Another important suggestion which I have left for last as I have felt it to be the most important is to Requiring a user to REGISTER before adding an item to the cart.
The moment I see a site that requires me to register with the site before I check out an item is the moment I myself would be searching for an alternate online store.
Most Recent Blog Post
While http://stevejbayer.com and http://stevebayer.net both have a google page rank of 4, I'm mothballing and pulling content from there over to http://stevejbayer.com since stevejbayer.com has a lot more visitors than stevebayer.net
Exercising my theming skills, I've transformed http://stevejbayer.com/resources into a replica of its stevebayer.net counterpart. That's right, I got the pushbutton theme to work on just one page of the site thanks to http://drupal.org/node/139766 while the remaining pages share a different theme. There was a bit of sidebar juggling involved as the theme in use right now (Barron) has the left sidebar as the default sidebar but displays it on the right. A bit of switching php calls and td (gasp a drupal core theme uses tables?)
Recent blog posts
- Mothballing stevebayer.net
- Who should design your website? A visual designer, an interacion designer or an information architect?
- Download the Google Chrome Web Browser From here
- Google Chrome
- Latest Vertical tabs module
- Google Search analysis off target?
- Think Dynamik relaunches their site with a great guide to the UX process
- The True Drupal 6 experts as of August 1 2008
- Things To Add to my to do checklist Summer 2008
- Break down of time used for sites as large as the New York Times observer
Usability News Feeds
UX and Information Architecture
- Everything New is Old Again
- Stuart Morgan lecture: Giving Form to Vision: Balancing the Three Disciplines of Leadership, Innovation, & Execution (Pittsburgh, PA)
- Understanding non-users
- Network and Learn - An evening of user experience design and information architecture discussion - Hosted by Organic (West Bloomfield)
- John Maeda's Inauguration Speech at RISD
