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Does The ROI Of Compound User Annoyance Matter?
Betcher booties it does. Here you are, finalizing your order via a website’s shopping cart. You come to the part 
where you enter the two letters of your state. Now, how often do you sigh with annoyance when encountering that drop-down menu and have to scroll through it for your state, when simply typing in the two letter abbreviation would be so much simpler . . . to say nothing of faster?
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen proves that you’re not alone. He also makes a compelling case that these annoyances have a compounding effect. Ignore it at your peril. Amazon quickly made the corrections. How soon will you?
Many Annoyances? Disruptive
Annoyances matter, because they compound. If the offending state-field drop-down were a site’s only usability violation, I’d happily award the site a gold star for great design. But sites invariably have a multitude of other annoyances, each of which delays users, causes small errors, or results in other unpleasant experiences.
A site that has many user-experience annoyances:
- appears sloppy and unprofessional,
- demands more user time to complete tasks than competing sites that are less annoying, and
- feels somewhat jarring and unpleasant to use, because each annoyance disrupts the user’s flow.
Even if no single annoyance stops users in their tracks or makes them leave the site, the combined negative impact of the annoyances will make users feel less satisfied. Next time they have business to conduct, users are more likely to go to other sites that make them feel better.
Source: Does User Annoyance Matter? (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
I urge you to read the entire article because the above was just the snippet I clipped. The full article is a fast read, and if your web stats reveal that people are dropping out at a particular phase of your checkout process, the ‘why’ of that is probably in this article.
By Walter |
Topics: Marketing Mishaps, Pet Peeves, Pro Analysis |