A Lesson in User Interface Design

As a new site without a major advertising budget and a set of principles that prevent me from spamming the bejesus out of the Internet to try and draw attention to Mall of Erotica, getting potential customers to the site is half the battle. The second half is getting them to actually buy something.

I carefully track all site interactions through my own code and database. I know most people would opt to use Google Analytics but I have the following reasons for not doing so:

• It's always a great learning experience to write your own code, and analytics data capturing is easy; it's the fancy reporting that Google Analytics does that makes them worthwhile
• I have full access to all the raw data in real time to report on it however I like
• The browsing habits of my users are nobody's business but mine.

That last point is an undervalued one, in my opinon. Google Analytics may be free, but you and your customers give up a fair bit of privacy to Google's ever-watching eyes. And when you run a fetish website people expect their privacy to be maintained so I do my best to keep it all a secret. That's the main reason that the entire site uses secure-sockets layer (https) instead of only during checkout.

Anyhow...as I said above I track all interactions through the site and this past week alone I've seen several people add items to their carts but never checked them out, resulting in a potential loss of revenue of about $56.00USD. Now that doesn't sound like much, but when the average product sells between two and six dollars, $56.00 is a big chunk of change. And a good businessman should always endeavour to get a sale from everyone who steps inside his store.

Now there could be many legitimate reasons for why those people didn't check out their items, such as having a change of heart, or people who just clicked the "Add to Cart" button to see what would happen, but having so many happen in such a short time bothered me.

I took a good look at my product page and realized a major flaw in the design: there was only one "Add to Cart" button, it was located under the main image thumbnail, and once the product was added to your cart you had to go to the top of the page to get to the "View my Shopping Cart" link toc check out. While it made sense when the site was developed I quickly realized that it might not be obvious to the average porn viewer how to actually pay for something once it is added to your cart.

To fix this, I reworked the product page to display a "Check Out" button under the "Add to Cart" button (but only when there are items in the cart), as well as included those buttons under the "Buy" panel on the right side of the screen (which up until today had consisted solely of the word "Buy" and the price):

 

I don't know if these changes will increase my sales, but if it reduces confusion for one shopper and they complete a transaction then it was worth it.

 

The lesson learned from all of this is "when testing, approach your website as if you have never seen it before. If it isn't obvious from a quick glance at the screen how to perform a function it probably won't be obvious to your users".

 

Some free development advice for you :)