Online search and e-commerce

Blog Andy Drake – Managing Consultant

More than a year on, it seems the pandemic has fundamentally brought about accelerated, and likely permanent change in the way we go about our daily lives. From personal experience, in our household of five, not a day goes by without an online delivery arriving and our dog barking. Sources estimated online spending in the UK rose between 35-40% in 2020. Many aspects were about accelerating what was already taking place but it also brought about significant new developments, such as growth for new over 55’s converts to online grocery shopping and small businesses in survival mode pivoting their business model. For those that could, that represented some degree of ‘democratisation of business’ but what has it done for consumers?

Much has been written about the importance of getting and retaining attention but our perspective is that with the rapid and embedded reality of online e-commerce, it goes way beyond that to a point where first impressions are crucial and are formed in a very short space of time.

the bar

The consumer has information at their fingertips and expectations are increasingly forged by the highest standards. Amazon is arguably the standard-bearer where their navigational path is a minimal number of clicks. Pre-pandemic, many significant bricks and mortar players had underplayed e-commerce, many still are, and many have complex businesses that carry a multitude of products. But the bar has been set very high.

Many websites fail at the first stage, the landing page. Various research pieces suggest consumers are making judgements within 0.05 milliseconds on whether they like your site or not and load times of over 2 seconds are likely to drive consumers away. That points the way to design where ‘less is more’ and first impressions are largely driven by great visual design rather than content. And tellingly great visual design starts with visual simplicity (limited text, clear imagery, layout in line with where we look) and design that aligns with style expectations of sites in that sector (i.e. an online wine website has certain hygiene design factors). Having insight into the entire consumer journey is key. Our study leaves no phase behind, from the first orientation to the next purchase, the combination of different techniques providing insight with which the strategy can be optimised per phase.

winning

Given the importance of first impressions, user experience testing becomes key throughout the development cycle, often as much to understand what doesn’t work as what does and to clear the navigational pathway. Time in this case definitely equals money.

But the pandemic has forced businesses of all shapes and sizes to react. As an example, I now order our weekly purchase of eggs direct from the farm online and the transaction is three clicks. Now the transaction is pretty simple, unsurprisingly the site is not overelaborate but the process and navigational path crystal clear. ‘Winning’ is not about scale, it is about ease of navigation: winners include Next who carry over 200,000 items to my local farm.

This blog is part of a series on First Impressions.
Read the first blog here.