Helping Online Users Stay on Course

Computerworld - Too often when users make a mistake typing in a link, they're rewarded with a page consisting of the words HTTP 404 -- File not found. Unfortunately, no further options are given to them. One quick way to freshen up a site is to replace the default error page with a company-branded page that not only informs users that something went wrong, but also provides some general links to help nudge them back on the right path.
Registration and shopping cart pages can be touched up by giving users more context-specific information in an easy-to-use format. For example, Staples Inc. in Framingham, Mass., eliminated drop-offs from its registration page just by handling errors better, says Colin Hynes, director of usability. Previously, if a user, say, "fat-thumbed" a letter into a ZIP code box and made other mistakes, the Staples site would generate a "modal" error page listing all the mistakes, he says. Then it would be up to the customer to hit the back button and fix the errors.
But the drop-off rate was staggering; people were leaving rather than fixing simple registration mistakes. The problem was at least partly the result of hard-wired human abilities. Hynes says common thinking is that people are good at retaining only "seven, plus or minus two." That is, "there are between five and nine chunks that they can keep in their heads for 10 seconds or so," he says. Any more exceeds the capacity of their short-term memory. Clearly, the site wasn't playing to that.
So Staples redesigned the error page. Now, "we play the page back," says Hynes, "then list the errors below the page." Errors are listed in red, with exclamation points and also bolded for color-blind users. The new changes worked -- drop-off from the registration errors page immediately decreased by 73%.
At Boston-based Fidelity Investments, a project team was formed to tackle a problem with trading fixed income bonds online -- there were only about nine such trades per day. But online trades are the most cost-effective for Fidelity, so the company wanted to move traders away from phones or outlets to the Web. The team and the business side agreed on a modest goal: 10% more bond trades online per day.
Usability testing discovered the cause of the low numbers: Unlike stock symbols, most people don't know their CUSIPs -- the symbols for bonds. The solution was to add a CUSIP symbol lookup field next to the CUSIP entry field. The payoff was quick. "Immediately, it went to150 [online bond] trades per day, which was 15% of all [online] fixed income trades," says Eleri Dixon, vice president for usability at Fidelity E-Business.
Even better, the new search capability was what she terms "a silent launch." That is, Fidelity added the functionality without any fanfare, and it still produced results.
Schwartz is a freelance writer in Somerville, Mass.

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