61% of users could not buy (fwd)

[jn@tommy.demon.co.uk (John Nissen)]

Hello,

There seem to be a lot of problems for sighted people to buy
online.  On the "curb cutting" principle, it would benefit
sighted people if web sites were accessible to visually impaired
people.   Could the WAI content guidelines be extended and promoted 
as good practice for commercial web designers, regardless of 
any disability that the potential customer may have?

There seems to be a lot of resistence to the existing guidelines.
I suspect that much of the resistence of commercial world, and
politicians who support that resistence (e.g. by interpretation of
ADA), is because "it costs".  The message should be that "it saves"!  

Just a thought.

Cheers from Chiswick,

John
--
Forwarded message follows:

Date:         Fri, 4 Feb 2000 10:57:55 +0100
Reply-To: Pascal MAGNENAT <pascal.magnenat@INTERACTIONS.CH>
Sender: "ACM SIGCHI WWW Human Factors (Open Discussion)" <CHI-WEB@acm.org>
From: Pascal MAGNENAT <pascal.magnenat@INTERACTIONS.CH>
Subject:      61% of users could not buy train tickets on the Swiss Federal
              Railways site
To: CHI-WEB@acm.org

Hello,

My name is Pascal Magnenat. I am an independant usability consultant 
based in Geneva. I am member of SIGCHI for several years but 
I haven't attended any event organised by SwissCHI yet. Hope I will 
do in the future!

I have recently studied the usability of 9 swiss e-commerce sites, 
namely Ackermann, Apple Switzerland, Fre'quence Laser, Easyshop Nestle', 
La Cave Edicom, Le-Shop, OfficeWorld, SBB and Ticketcorner.

13 frequent Internet users have been asked to order 2 items on each 
of these sites. The 3 components of usability (efficiency, effectiveness 
and satisfaction) as defined by ISO 9241-11 have been measured according 
to the following criteria:

1) conformity to the given instructions
2) time spent (max. 15 minutes)
3) degree of comfort (1 to 7 scale)
4) user satisfaction according to time spent (1 to 7 scale)
5) user understanding of conceptual model (1 to 7 scale)
6) usability perception (1 to 7 scale)
7) reuse probability (1 to 7 scale)

Here are some of the conclusions:

1) For most users, order an item on the web is difficult: only one 
out of 13 users has successfully ordered all the items on the 9 sites 
tested;

2) usability varies a lot from one site to another: twice as many users 
have placed an order on La Cave (85%) than on the SBB site (39%); 
in half the
time.

3) users are very sensible to the ease of use and are not willing 
to make a disappointing experience twice!

Possible origins of poor usability:

- visibility of text or graphic hyperlinks
- poor feed-back
- inappropriate trolley metaphor
- unpredictable effect of the browser "back" button (many users tried to
delete an item thrown in the trolley by this mean)
- reliability

The full report (English version) is available at
http://www.interactions.ch/e/extras/copy.html.

Have a nice day.


Pascal Magnenat
Usability consultant
"Usability professionals' association" member

---------------------------------------------------------
Phone +41 878 878 638
Fax +41 860 793 01 39 01
Email pascal.magnenat@interactions.ch
Web site  http://wwww.interactions.ch
Postal address Colombettes 21, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland
---------------------------------------------------------

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John Nissen                             Email to jn@tommy.demon.co.uk
Cloudworld Ltd., Chiswick, London, UK   http://www.tommy.demon.co.uk