Even though I say it every year, this year I really am going to do all my Christmas shopping online. I’ve already made a start, which is pretty impressive seeing as it’s not even December yet. Obviously Amazon will account for a sizeable percentage of my online shopping love (CDs, books and video games, mostly), but I’ll also be trying out some other online stores. First off was my mum’s favourite shop Marks and Spencer – lots of female relations to buy for, you see – which I see today has come out top in a usability study of high street stores’ e-commerce sites. But doing a study is different from actually being a customer – Marks and Sparks won’t come top of my e-commerce experience Christmas list, and here’s why…
On the face of it, M&S has a good-looking site. It has a decent layout, clear navigation and a good search function. But the devil is very much in the detail when it comes to using it.
First, the product listings pages. They’re smartly laid out with good product photographs and clear prices. The main trouble is that only 9 products are shown per page, so you have to click through lots of pages to see all the products. In the Beauty section of the 3 for 2 Offers, that means 12 pages before you’ve seen everything, making it very tedious to browse. It’s likely that you’ll give up before you get to the end.
Another problem is that there’s no way of re-ordering the listing, so you can’t browse alphabetically or by price or by popularity or by most recently added product. You just have to take them in the order that they’re given – and it’s not even clear what order that is. So if you’re working to a budget (as many of us do), you can’t just sort everything cheap to the first few pages, you have to keep plodding through in the hope of spying some low-priced items. Or if you have stacks of cash to splash, you can’t group all the high-priced items together, either.
The next problem with the product listings pages isn’t a major usability issue, but it demonstrates a lack of attention to detail on behalf of the developers. Under the picture of each product on the listings page is a shortened version of the product’s description. This isn’t unusual for e-commerce sites that want to show a some description but are pushed for space. But what is unusual is that they haven’t bothered to end the truncated description on a whole word, so they end up with off-putting descriptions like “Ring bell before entering! She’ll know she has com …” and “The perfect police car with push button s …”
It is technically trivial to select the desired numbers of characters from the left of a string and then track back to the last space, thus giving you a string that end on a whole word, rather than half a word or ever a single letter.
What makes M&S’s implementation worse is that there’s no consistency in the look of the truncated descriptions – some are on two lines and some run on to three lines depending on the line-break. So they end up with the worst of both worlds – a raggedy layout and sentences truncated in mid word.
I have some nieces and nephews age between 6 and 10 so thought that The Roald Dahl Collection would be a good gift for them. I clicked on to the product page to read the full description: “This collection of Roald Dahl’s stories and poems will delight children and adults for many, many years to come.” And that’s it. Less information than you’d find on the back cover of the book or its inside jacket. They haven’t bothered to type it in.
I wanted to buy that book but couldn’t because they hadn’t given me enough information about it. Basic stuff.
Amusingly (for us), it gets worse. Can anyone spot the deliberate mistake(s) on this right-hand part of the Con Moto Perfect Pampering Paradise Gift Set product page?
10 points if you’re wondering why there’s such an enormous gap between the quantity selector drop-down and the Add to Basket button. Why the hell would they do that? They clearly know it’s disastrous from a usability point of view because they’ve had to add “Scroll to add to basket” text underneath the drop-down. Crazy.
Why not put the Add to Basket button where the “Scroll to add to basket” text is?
And another 10 points if you noticed that the default selection of the quantity selection drop-down is set to, er, 0. Zero. Nothing. So if you read the (for once) fulsome product description and decide you want to buy, you click the Add to Basket button and are given the ultra-confusing message: “Please select an item” in a nasty Javascript pop-up window.
My reaction: “I have selected an item, this bloody site doesn’t work.” There’s no “Scroll up to select quantity” text by the Add to Basket button so you’re left wondering how to do something basic like adding a product to the basket.
And anyway: would somebody please explain the logic of starting a quantity selector on zero? When will anyone ever want to add zero of a product to their basket. Surely 1 has to be only sensible choice? And why use a drop-down anyway? Can’t we be trusted to type in a number?
So this is the mechanic of the product page. Scroll down and read description. Click Add to Basket. Be told that’s wrong. Click OK. Wonder what’s up. Guess the answer might be at the top of the page. Scroll up. Spot Quantity drop-down. Click and click again to choose 1. Scroll back down. Click Add to Basket.
And that’s award-winning usability, is it? Don’t go away, it’s about to get worse.
Already irritated by the foibles of the Marks and Sparks site, when this happened, I started to get really annoyed. For no good reason, other than it was Monday night and there might have been a few people online trying to do their fucking shopping, the site bombed out and gave me this message.
“Sorry, you may be experiencing some difficulties viewing the site.” Too right! It’s disappeared and this stupid message is in its place. “Please click the following button to go to the home page.”
And what did the button say? “Start shopping” FFS. I’ve already started shopping. I’m not the one having difficulties, it’s *you* that’s got the problem. It was annoying that it happened, the message that they gave me made it even worse.
Was the evening of Monday 27 November especially busy for e-commerce sites? I don’t think so. If the Marks and Spencer site has problems then, it’s going to be in serious trouble when the Christmas rush really starts.
The best thing about the Marks and Spencer site was all the 3 for the price of 2 offers, all on some crazy mix-and-match offer so you could buy beauty product, toys, gifts, CDs and DVD and make savings across the board.
3 for the price of 2 is a pretty simple concept. But the way it’s presented in the shopping basket is confusing. Instead of identifying one of the items as free, they do some crazy calculation and take an amount off each item in the basket. It is impossible to tell how they’ve worked it out.
But more annoying than that, I had every Internet shopper’s worst nightmare: the basket emptied itself. I added 4 items on Sunday night and when I came back to the site on Monday night, it said I had 4 items in my basket at the top of the screen. When I clicked to view the basket, it emptied itself. Super annoying.
Also annoying: when you add an item to your basket and click to Continue Shopping, it takes you back to the category home page, not to the product you were last viewing. Very annoying, especially if you can’t remember which of the 12 Beauty listing pages you were on. Have I said it was annoying? Good.
But then it got worse. I tried to add another product to my basket and… kabooom.
“We’re really busy at the moment which means we’re unable to take any order.”
WTF?!
“Please feel free to browse and try shopping again in five minutes.”
WTF?! WTF?!!!
So many things…
1 I wasn’t trying to order, I was only trying to add to basket.
2 It’s not actually a busy time, so it’s lame beyond belief that your site can’t cope right now.
3 What is it about your technology that can’t let me add to basket but can show me this message?
4 You must know your technology is crap because you’ve had the foresight to write this message
5 “Feel free to browse”. Why thank you! So “browsing” is not actually “shopping”, then? A subtle difference that escapes me.
6 What’s going to be different in “five minutes”? Will everyone have given up on you and gone to John Lewis?
7 You are one of the biggest shopping brands in the UK. This should never happen.
But I had so many items in my basket by now, I wasn’t going to quit. I just wanted to checkout as quickly as possible. So I waited the designated five minutes (or was it 10?) and went through the checkout.
But there are more problems and irritations. The mailing list sign-up box is an opt-out – you have to tick the box (a positive thing, normally) to not join their special offers mailing list.
Annoying because it’s an extra click that I shouldn’t have to make. And I feel like you’re trying to trick me into joining your mailing list when I don’t want to. If you can’t be straight with me about this, what else aren’t you being straight with me about?
Oh God, this was terrible too. Marks had a special promotion – free delivery if you spend more than £30. But rather than automatically apply it to orders over £30, you had to visit a specific page on the site to find a promotion code. Then, when you got to a certain stage of the checkout, you had to enter the code to claim the free delivery (even though it was contingent on you spending more than £30 anyway). What a ballache.
But it gets worse. I qualified for free delivery, but the amount wasn’t taken off my final order total and delivery was still shown as £3.50. I had to trust the message that said, effectively, “If you’ve entered a promotional code for free delivery, we won’t charge you for delivery even though your order total here and your order total on the confirmation screen will show that we have charged you for it.” What a shambles.
So what was the point of all that faff with the promotional code if the checkout total is going to ignore it anyway? It’s not like I got the promotional code from another site so its use should be limited to certain people. The offer was promotion on the M&S site itself. Pointless waste of time, not to mention a poor technical implementation.
Lastly (thank God), I used their feedback form to send them a message about the delivery charge, saying that the free delivery hadn’t been reflected in my final order total either before or after paying. And this is the message you get on submit: “Thank you for your comments.”
No indication of how quickly they’ll respond (it took two days) which left me feeling severely underwhelmed and unloved.
Good job they had all those 3-for-2 offers or I’d have been really pissed off.
I hope the stuff arrives on time.