Bugs and user experience
Fixing bugs — the next ‘big thing’ in e-commerce?
I was surprised by some of the findings in this report from the Baymard Institute about bugs in e-commerce systems. We all know how damaging a buggy system can be. But what was news to me was that such problems are affecting even the largest companies.
…We’ve similarly observed how seemingly innocent layout bugs and quirky interactive features have caused test subjects to believe the site had been hacked or wasn’t currently working properly, causing them to abandon their purchase due to a lack of trust in the site, even for major brands such as Amazon and Walmart. (If a user believes your site has been hacked, having even the most trustworthy of brands won’t matter because they no longer think it’s you.)
Despite just how critical these bugs can be to the user experience and site conversions, they are astoundingly common. For the past 5+ years we’ve conducted 4 large-scale usability studies and every single time the test subjects have stumble into a wide host of UI bugs and server errors, and for the past 3 years we’ve audited numerous multi-million and billion dollar sites and during every single site audit we’ve identified lingering technical errors, layout bugs or flawed interactive features (despite always testing in up-to-date browsers).
This is one of the reasons why it is so important to conduct regular usability testing. We have put together a proposal to conduct regular testing to help us catch as many usability and technical bugs as possible.