'Retailer UX Audit' Released by Usography
Usography published the "Retailer UX Audit," which evaluated 100 top retailers on the number of UX features found on their primary e-commerce web sites in Spring 2011. The Audit gives retailers a very quick view into competitive and best practices.
Online, June 13, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Sears.com tops the UX Audit
***Full Audit Available at http://www.usography.com/audit ***
Athens, Georgia - Usography, a user experience strategy agency for top retailers, today released the Spring 2011 Retailer UX Audit. The Audit reflects retailers' efforts provide an engaging customer experience to customers as they shop digital channels.
"The Audit gives retailers an objective competitive benchmark in the area of user experience feature sets," said Paul Bryan, Director of User Research and Design Strategy for Usography.
To create the Audit, Usography reviewed the e-commerce web sites of 100 top retailers in Spring 2011. Retailers were assigned a total score based on the presence or absence of 30 user experience design features, which were derived from a comprehensive review of retail industry best practices. Of the 100 retail web sites reviewed, Sears.com came in first place, with 16 out of 30 possible points.
Some UX features, such as "Email a friend" and "Product Reviews" were available on a majority of the sites reviewed. Others, such as product videos and price drop alerts, were only available on a small percentage of the sites. The full list of criteria are presented in the Audit, as are the scores of all 100 retailers, and links to screen captures of all of the retailers' product pages.
"In Usography's research with customers of many top retailers, we have found that the user experience of a web site can make the difference between a sale and abandonment for a competitor's site," Mr. Bryan said. "If this happens over thousands or even millions of customers, then we're talking about a sizeable amount of lost revenue due to user experience deficiencies."
"The characteristics of different customer segments and different product categories should be considered as retailers consider which UX features they will include in their sites. Having the right mix of features is more important than having more features than competitors, although the retailers with the highest scores are clearly UX powerhouses.
The Retailer UX Audit is the basic free version of more extensive competitive and best practice reports produced by Usography in the area of multichannel retail. More detailed reports are available on a monthly or quarterly basis, filling the need for an inexpensive way for all team members and executives to stay current in the state of the art of digital retail user experience. Contact Usography for pricing information.
The Retailer UX Audit, with links to screen captures of the product pages of all 100 top retailer sites, can be found online at http://www.usography.com/audit.
For more information about Usography, or the Retailer Social Commerce Audit, please contact Paul Bryan at (770) 722-8123, or send an email to Audit@usography.com.