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By Dr. Novadean Watson-Williams
Program Director, Information Technology Management and Computer Technology

and Dr. John Rhome
Faculty Member, School of STEM

How was your shopping experience this holiday season? Did you get the kind of buying experience you anticipated? If the process of buying a product or service went smoothly for you at an ecommerce website, that was largely due to a carefully designed user experience (UX).

Start a degree in information technology management at American Public University.

User Experience and the UX Honeycomb Model

According to the Interaction Design Foundation, “User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users.” For an ecommerce website, there is a team of specialists who ensure that your shopping experience goes smoothly.

User experience expert Peter Morville, who is proclaimed by many as the “founding father” of information architecture, coauthored the best-selling book in the UX discipline, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. He has advised clients such as AT&T, Dow Chemical, Ford, the IMF, the Library of Congress and Microsoft.

Morville also crafted the User Experience Honeycomb Model. He uses this model of user experience to remind organizations to move beyond the usability of services and products and comprehensively address UX by incorporating certain characteristics in a website’s design, such as making sure a website is:

  • Accessible
  • Usable
  • Useful
  • Credible
  • Desirable
  • Findable
  • Valuable

When users visit an ecommerce website, they expect to interact with technologies that promote:

  • Easy access to content, products and services from a more central and fast-finding position, particularly for those with disabilities.
  • A usable platform to provide stress-free navigation of website content, products and services.
  • A useful experience in that users may intelligently participate in the process of customizing, buying and selling during their time on an ecommerce site.
  • Credible feedback and candid sharing of perspectives and ways to improve content, products and services for users. Gallup ecommerce experts Kirti Barry and Chris Portera observe, “To strengthen… customer engagement, Gallup recommends using customer analytics to better understand your customers’ underlying needs and expectations — what’s driving their purchase decisions.”
  • Desirable guidance and support without the need for users to fish through materials such as a user manual, technical documentation, and website content with a series of non-contiguous pages. Those users may experience undue frustration that may negatively impact their first impression of the ecommerce site and willingness to buy. Barry and Portera note, “Gallup’s research finds that customers make 70% of their purchase decisions based on emotions. Uncovering the emotional components that drive … customers to purchase … products and services will help … prioritize … marketing efforts.”
  • Findable resources which reinforce users’ confidence in website content, products and services.
  • Valuable experiences considering the “why, what and how” in one central location.

The Importance of a Well-Designed Ecommerce Website

Ensuring a good user experience is paramount to attracting and retaining e-commerce customers. But there may be gaps between what a company has designed and customers’ actual user experience.

B2B experts Brandon Barrett and Shannon Mullen O’Keefe note, “This gap in expectations — the inconsistency between sales teams’ perceptions and prospects’ actual experiences — is not unusual.” Organizations often fail to get needed feedback to the right source to ensure that users’ needs are better addressed.

Gallup executive Marco Nink says, “A recent Gallup study in Europe and the U.S. shows that the majority of employees do not regularly receive information about what’s important to their customers and less than one-third strongly agree their company actively involves customers in improving products.”

How UX Is Addressed Today

According to the white paper “Value-centered design process for UX enhancement — a case study in the development of a notebook PC,” written by Japanese engineer and Okayama University professor Toshihisa Doi, “since 2000, in the planning and development of products and services, providing users with a better experience when using products and services has become essential, resulting in a growing need for value-centered design that focuses on providing users with [a] more attractive experience.”

With everything from pharmaceuticals, home mortgages, car purchases and grocery shopping, businesses recognize the importance of providing an exceptional online user experience. For example, a customer-friendly Point-of-Sale (POS) system can provide that experience while also improving the effectiveness and efficiencies of the organization.

Additionally, the analytics associated with a POS system can be consumer-predictive, which can further enhance the UX experience with product recommendations and improve future inventory controls associated with the business. Bottom-line, a consumer-focused POS system is a win-win situation for both the consumer and the business.

Overall, addressing user experience today requires analyzing customer needs by using different analytic tools, human-centered design and development, and timely strategies, which requires specialized employee training. According to Emsi Analyst, today’s UX designers need skills in:

  • Javascript
  • Java
  • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  • Structured Query Language (SQL)
  • Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
  • Angular (an open-source Web framework)
  • Agile methodology
  • Front-end software development
  • JQuery
  • Web Services

In fact, the user experience has become so critical in the ecommerce industry that in 2020, the Dept. of Education created a new Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) code to address UX designers: Human-Centered Technology Design — 11.0105.

UX Training

Among other organizations, the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) provides UX designers with the training to make users’ experience at ecommerce websites a priority. Their mission is to establish a better experience for ecommerce site users through usability, user-centered design (UCD), user experience communities and think tanks.

Usability.gov notes, “UX is a growing field that is very much still being defined. Creating a successful user-centered design encompasses the principles of human-computer interaction (HCI) and goes further to include the following disciplines: Project Management, Information Architecture (IA), User Interface Design, Interaction Design (IxD), Content Strategy, and Web Analytics.”

So the next time you go shopping on a website, recognize that your user experience is being monitored and discussed by those who work behind the scenes. Whether you use a smartphone, a notebook, a laptop, or a desktop computer, your UX at an ecommerce website should be smooth and free of problems.

About the Authors

Dr. Novadean Watson-Williams is currently the Program Director for the undergraduate programs in Information Technology Management and Computer Technology at American Public University. She serves an aggressively growing department and has over 20 years of experience in the information technology field. Dr. Watson-Williams holds an A.A. in Computer Studies and a B.S. in Information Systems Management from the University of Maryland University College, a B.S. in Social Science Education from the University of South Florida, an M.A. in General Counseling from Louisiana Tech University, and a D.B.A. in Information Systems from Argosy University. 

Previously, she published several blog articles on topics such as “Countering Cybersecurity Attacks through Accountability,” “Creating a Personal Brand through Using the Internet,” “Leadership Using Effective Nonverbal Communication”, “Inspiring Self-Improvement through Technology Education, Collective Intelligence and Soft Skills”. She has also co-published several other articles, including “RFID with Real Implications,” “Artificial Intelligence in Information Security” and the “Evolution of Information Security.”

Dr. John Rhome is currently the Senior Director of IT for Centene, as well as a part-time STEM instructor for American Public University. Dr. Rhome’s research interests include the significance of employee empowerment, teamwork and diversity in the modern-day organization. Dr. Rhome is a passionate presenter of his research interests, as well as being a huge supporter of STEM programs with many universities.

He is extremely active in his local community by supporting county improvement programs, Feeding Florida and youth development activities. Dr. Rhome holds a Doctorate in Organizational Leadership from the University of Phoenix, an MBA in technology management from the University of Phoenix and a bachelor’s in management information systems from the University of Tampa.