Monday, October 11, 2010

Visual Design, Information Architecture, and Content in Usability

Following up on my earlier post on User experience, I learnt about three highly cohesive parameters of Usability. Concentrating on just one of these aspect does not assure success of the product and it is necessary to have all of them to work in harmony.

Lets take a hypothetical scenario with a customer Liz to understand it :-

Liz is browsing an e-commerce site to purchase a credit card wallet. Like any other customer, she has multiple questions in her mind and wants to be assured about
the product before making the transaction. Now with the information available on the site, let's see if she buys the wallet or leaves the site after being frustrated.

Liz is looking at the design pages on the site, but can find only the outer portion view of the wallet. She liked the outer design, but is not able to see the back of the product. She wants to make sure that it would also store small changes with a zippered pocket. But due to a limited visual view, she is not able to make this judgement. The next option, in this case could be to look at the product description, but the description is at the bottom of the page under many unrelated selling items and Liz might not scroll to the bottom of the page. Moreover the description section has many irrelevant facts, like how the wallet is constructed from durable leather and a silk blend and is perfect to store all of our daily essentials. Yet it doesn't answer a simple question of whether it can carry loose changes or not.

Next strategy that comes in Liz's mind is "Maybe, if there is a return policy, I'd buy it. Then, if I don't like it, I could return it". Not a bad approach !

But this would help,only if she could find the return policy in the site, which she couldn't. There was no link to it on the product page. That's when she tried searching. Typing "Return Policy" into the Search box produced the error message, stating no results found. Poking around on the site did uncover a link labeled "Help" which produced an unordered Frequently-Asked Questions list. However, apparently returning a credit card wallet is not something frequently asked, because there is no helpful information on that topic.

Liz is frustrated and leaves the site. The sale is lost.

So what did we observe here ?

There is a three-way failure to communicate what the shopper needed to make her purchase. It was a simultaneous failure of the site's visual design, the information architecture, and the content design.

When Liz couldn't easily see the design of the product and she didn't locate the product description, she encountered visual design issues. When she couldn't find the page with the return policy, she bumped into an information architecture issue. And the inadequate product description and unclear policy issues were the content design issues.

Fixing just one of these would not help as the real solution comes from the interplay of these three areas and it is worth giving a thought.

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