'Back' Button and Search are Kiss of Death to Ecommerce, says Spool

Giving a talk entitled 'Usability: Beyond Common Sense', Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering in Massachusetts, USA, presented research that overturned many golden design rules. He also asked a number of difficult questions, in a controversial presentation organised jointly by the British HCI Group and the Usability Professionals Association UK.

'I have yet to meet anybody who doesn't think usability is important - I haven't lectured on the need for it since 1986,' he told the audience. But usability has become an evangelical movement, he said. In the absence of actual solutions, the problem with this is 'you have to claim you have all the answers' when you don't and this alienates your market in the end. At present, he said, usability testing was not correlated with the development of usable sites. In many cases, we have no idea know what makes some sites better to use than others.

Spool spelt out some of the many areas in which we do not have answers. 'How do you know whether someone who has just discovered they have a lymphoma gets everything they need from this site?' he asked, indicating the cancer support site of America's National Cancer Institute. 'There are practical and ethical issues about finding out. Just what is their goal? It's a hard question.'

Because of the complexity of this kind of research, Spool's company has focused on ecommmerce as an area where intentions are simpler: to buy or to sell.

Their research into users' behaviour has produced several findings of interest to designers:

- Task completion averages 42%.
- This completion rate falls to 18% if there is a single 'Back' click in the flow of the clickstream recording a user's visit, and down to 2% if there are two uses of the 'Back' button. Spool calls the 'Back' button the 'Button of Doom'.
- Search is only used if categorisation is not adequate on the home page.
- Search is not a short cut but associated with a greater number of clicks than task completion without search.
- Search does not lead to success; on average it is a predictor of failure with a lower completion rate correlated with it.
- Most search words entered are category terms, what Spool calls 'triggers'.

Spool attributes these problems to poor design - if 'trigger' words are well anticipated and written into the navigation of the site, then specifically using a search mechanism would be unnecessary and repeated returns to a higher level to look elsewhere (the 'Back' clicking) would not take place either.

Analysing the search log for trigger words and incorporating them directly into the categorisation on the site overcomes many of these problems, he said.

His company has looked at other aspects of buying online, and found that poor categorisation and then representation of goods has lost more sales than bad checkout design.

To improve design more generally, he concluded, we need to:
- create feedback loops for designers
- research fundamentals
- tie design to business
- not assume that common sense is correct.

Visit the related UN news story: Spool discusses Design Patterns and promises Data.
An interview with Jared Spool will be on site soon.

Associated Link: User Interface Engineering

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