Measuring E-Commerce Usability

Web surfers complain that e-commerce sites are too difficult to use -- and most designers and hosting professionals know that they are right.

"Yes, the quality of the experience someone has shopping online isn't what it should be," says New York-based e-commerce consultant Judy Boros. "Even the benchmark sites, like Amazon.com, don't make it as easy as you'd expect if you look at the process from the user's perspective. It only looks good if you've got very low expectations, which most Internet professionals, who are too close to the technology, do have."

But is it worth a $15,000 investment for new software that measures the quality of a customer's experience? Massachussets-based WebSpective Inc. thinks so -- it's now offering a new add-on to its e-commerce platform that measures commerce usability -- something akin to the standard quality of service, or QoS ratings in the telecommunications world -- for e-commerce sites

But others disagree. "The problem," says one California-based designer, "isn't that we can't figure out that these sites are less than dazzling. It's that the owners need to invest real money and thought into making it better, and for the most part they just don't want to. I could see this as a sales tool -- so you can say to your client, 'Look, you got a low usability score, you should invest in improving it' -- but lack of understanding isn't the issue. The issue is that it costs a lot today to get over the barriers we're talking about, and even the bigger sites aren't interested in those large investments for what are largely intangibles."

Tom Henry, vice president of marketing at WebSpective, sees the real-time, highly-specific nature of his new product as its saving grace. "E-business sites are concerned about quality of service in transaction and content-critical environments," he says. "They need to be able to measure service levels in real-time, and react to potential problems before customers are affected." That clearly goes beyond broader issues of usability

In the long run, as hosts find themselves supporting higher-ticket, more mission-critical transactions on the sites they host, investments in QoS will begin to make more sense. In the current environment of $29.99 gift and book transactions, most will pass on the investment until their hosting clients demand it.