James Altucher – E-commerce User Experience: Wishlists, Gift Certificates, and Gift Giving in E-Commerce

James Altucher – E-commerce User Experience: Wishlists, Gift Certificates, and Gift Giving in E-Commerce

103 Design Guidelines for Improving Usability

From a marketing perspective, wishlists and gift certificates are wonderful because they introduce your site to new customers. Unfortunately, this exact advantage turns into a tremendous challenge for website usability.

First-time customers are also first-time users, and they won’t know how to operate your site. They might not even know your brand. They arrive at your site because somebody else likes to shop there. The smallest glitch in the user experience can be fatal for these users.

The report contains 103 guidelines for improving the design of wishlists and gift-certificate features, as well as their associated email messages. The report is richly illustrated with 50 screenshots of many different design ideas, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of highly-usable gift features.

The report also contains flow charts with wireframes of the best practices in wishlist and gift-certificate user experiences. You can use these design patterns as a starting point for improving your own site and emails.

This report is based on user testing of 22 e-commerce sites:

This report is based on empirical usability testing and shows what happens when real users interact with real gift-giving features on real websites.

Table of Contents

115-page report with 50 screenshots and 6 task-flow diagrams:

1. Executive Summary
   • User Research
   • Usability Issues
   • Email as Gift-Giving Medium
   • Online Gifting: User Attitudes
   • Better Gift User Experience
2. Wishlists, Gift Certificates and Gift Giving
3. Research Overview
4. User Attitudes toward Online Gift Giving
   • Fear of Online Gifting
   • Personal Touch Versus Convenience
   • The Guilt and Relief Around Gift Certificates and Wishlists
   • And the Best Gift Is …
5. List of Guidelines
6. Choosing Gifts Online; The Steps Involved and Barriers at Each Step
   • The Gift Choice Process
     • Finding a Trustable Site
     • Finding a Suitable Item
     • Purchasing the Item
     • Choosing Gift Options
     • The Gift Receipt and Message for the Recipient
     • Shipping to a Different Address
     • Confirming Order and Receipt
7. Gift Certificate Guidelines
   • Gift Certificates: Purchasing, Giving, Receiving and Redeeming
   • Advertising Certificates on Your Site
   • Purchasing and Sending Certificates
   • Receiving E-certificates
   • Redeeming Certificates
8. Wishlist Guidelines
9. Ease of Use of Wishlists by Gift Requester and Purchaser
   • Wishlist considerations
   • Creating the List
   • Adding Items
   • Sharing the List
   • Notification Mail
   • Buying From a Wishlist
10. The Top 8 Improvements You Can Make to Your Site in Hardly Any Time
    • Basics
    • Certificates
    • Wishlists
    • Track Your Gift Metrics
11. Study Methodology
    • Usability Study of 22 Gift-Giving Sites
      • The Sites
      • Participants
      • Tasks
    • User Interview Responses
    • Field Research into Wishlist Creation and Gift Purchasing
      • Registry Creation
      • Gift Purchasing
    • About Using This Methodology for Your Own Studies
12. Further Reading

What You Get

• Checklist of 103 specific design recommendations: review your gift-giving features for these 103 items, and you will no doubt discover several things that need improvement.
• Description of how users behave when using a wide variety of designs for wishlists and gift certificates, including the associated email notifications. Learn from the users’ comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the websites we tested.
• 50 screenshots of Web pages with descriptions of why they worked well or caused problems in usability testing.
• 6 flowcharts of best-practice user experiences that can serve as design pattens for your own project.
• $100,000 of user research with real shoppers at 0.1% of the cost; find out how real users behave when they use wishlists and gift certificates.
• Test methodology description, allowing you to run your own user tests of your own gift-giving features, using a proven study protocol developed by the world’s leading authority on user research methods.

Who Should Read This Report?

This report has timely and important information for anybody responsible for an e-commerce site, especially in the B2C sector.

Conducting the same level of in-depth user research yourself to collect comparative design lessons from a large number of websites would cost about $100,000.

Please help us continue publishing low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that’s obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody “gives” you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.