User Experience

December 28, 2010 • PEC Staff

December 6, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor’s Note: In September we published “Volunteer for a Free Mobile-Optimized Ecommerce Site,” soliciting merchants to volunteer for a mobile optimization case study in which we follow the process of ...

September 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The Opera web browser allows web surfers to use quick, predetermined mouse movements to complete many common browsing tasks, such as going back to a previous page, opening new tabs, or reloading a page. Once users become familiar with these mouse gestures, they can surf the web potenti...

July 27, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: The article below discusses screen readers, the software that reads aloud text on a computer screen. Screen reader software allows visually handicapped consumers to use Internet sites. To help text-reading consumers understand what a visually-handicapped user experiences,...

March 11, 2010 • Joseph C. Dolson

Target.com is well known in the world of web accessibility. It was sued in 2006 by the National Federation of the Blind, Bruce F. Sexton, Jr., and the National Federation of the Blind of California because its website was not accessible to visually impaired shoppers. The lawsuit was ult...

February 4, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons

As an increasing number of mobile users access the web, merchants may be unsure exactly how to react. Should they build a mobile optimized site, design and submit an app to be approved by the Apple App Store or Android Market, or something else? Mobile users have different web needs th...

January 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio

How we shop is going to change. Digital interactivity at brick-and-mortar stores, mobile commerce, and rich Internet applications are going to have a significant effect on shopper experience in the next few years. But most of the changes to the shopper experience will not come overnigh...

January 14, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons

Last week, I cited estimates for the number of Internet-capable mobile devices sold in 2009, and how this has already outpaced the number of computers sold, both portable and desktop. Here I’ll show you some useful tools for determining how effectively your site, in its present form, op...

December 2, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

Ecommerce merchants spend a lot of time thinking about statistics. They try to gauge who is visiting their website, what products consumers are most interested in, and how consumers are finding those products. Without knowing about their audience, merchants have a difficult time marketi...

November 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Offering shoppers personalized product recommendations can increase conversion rates and profits while fending off shopping cart abandonment. Onsite product merchandising—the idea of cross-, up-, and down-selling to shoppers—is a potent tool for ecommerce marketers that often takes th...

October 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Research indicates that as many as 60 percent of online shoppers use a merchant's search feature to navigate the website. With so many potential customers typing keywords rather than using a site's navigation hierarchy, advanced search features are not just nice to have. They are a comp...

October 1, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

Disabled consumers often face great challenges when browsing and making purchases online. Perhaps as many as ten percent of online shoppers have a disability, such as low-or-no vision or an inability to use a keyboard, that can make it difficult to understand content and navigate websit...

September 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Christian Book Distributors (CBD) and its website, ChristianBook.com, has become largest catalog and online seller of Christian books and products in the world. Two teenaged brothers, Ray and Steve Hendrickson, founded it in 1978, in Massachusetts. The brothers launched the company, ac...

September 6, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

Disabled Internet users often face great challenges when browsing and making purchases online. Perhaps as many as ten percent of online shoppers have a disability, such as low-or-no vision or an inability to use a keyboard, that can make it difficult to understand content and navigate w...

August 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Newegg, the second largest ecommerce retailer in the U.S., provided a flawless shopping experience that made it easy to understand why the company has become one of the most trusted and respected electronics retailers, bar none. Newegg set an excellent example of how online retailers c...

August 11, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

A crucial element of any ecommerce website is the ability for all customers to complete a purchase on the site, including those with disabilities. If a potential customer cannot navigate your online store's shopping cart or checkout process, it makes little difference what kind of acces...

July 31, 2009 • Armando Roggio

The Gap.com provides a positive online shopping experience that emanates professionalism, trustworthiness, and quality. But it is an experience that even small ecommerce businesses can emulate. In 1996, the actress Sharon Stone wore a black Gap turtleneck to Hollywood's grandest gala, ...

June 30, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

The state of legal requirements and protections concerning the accessibility of websites is far from uniform. Many countries have some form of web accessibility laws in place, but the extent of those laws is radically variable. Furthermore, as many websites serve multiple countries, the...

June 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio

CSS, Flash, jQuery, and an arsenal of other powerful web techniques and technologies have unbound website design, creating the opportunity to develop either exceptional user interfaces or really frustrating ones. Furthermore, the growth of "cookie-cutter" ecommerce templates (i.e., “i...

May 22, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

This is the fourth article in my series on the new WCAG 2.0. The previous installments are "A Welcomed Update," "Part II: Operability," and "Part III: Understandability." In this article, I'll addresses “robustness."

April 22, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

This is the third article in my series on the new WCAG 2.0. The previous installments are "A Welcomed Update" and "Part II: Operability." In this article, I'll addresses “understandability."

April 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Each month, Practical eCommerce sends me shopping. I make a purchase from a real online merchant and create both an article and a video of the shopping experience. My goal is to report back to you about the overall checkout process, customer service experience, website aesthetics, and d...

March 24, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

This is the second article in my series on WCAG 2.0. The first installment, "New Accessibility Guidelines A Welcomed Update," we published last month. The concept behind website operability is simple: Can everybody use the tools and mechanisms required to operate your website?

February 25, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

The World Wide Web Consortium recently approved new accessibility guidelines. Passed in December 2008, the new "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" is the official recommendation for web accessibility for the disabled. This new WCAG 2.0 document, a welcomed update, replaces...

January 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Since 1998 Really Old Records of Natick, Mass. has been offering a selection of "unusual and collectible recordings," taking full advantage of the Long Tail concept. But the store was slow to ship and did not communicate at all with me after I made a purchase online. On December 22, 20...

November 6, 2008 • Joseph C. Dolson

Using video and audio in a website increases the probability of an accessibility problem. Where text can be readily translated into a wide variety of alternative mediums for the disabled, the complex nature of video and audio make this kind of machine-generated comprehension nearly impo...

July 15, 2008 • Joseph C. Dolson

In an era of Internet commerce, it’s an unsurprising phenomenon that we expect the vast majority of our interactions with customers to happen in an online environment. The expectation is that people will send an email, contact us through support forms or simply place an order. But it’s ...