Discussions on AJAX-ed One Page checkout

I’ve recently produced a “feature tour” presentation designed to be a self-paced overview of all Elastic Path 5 features and benefits without technical jargon and acronyms and low on marketing double-speak. Really a scrapbook tour of what it looks like to shop an EP5 built store and how the back-end is managed and finally, how the catalog and merchandising is set-up.

The one acronym which does appear (OK, maybe there are two) is AJAX - meaning Asyncronous Javascript And XHTML - this is a technique rather than a technology or a product. I played with the AJAX-ified pieces of EP5 while screen-shooting *everything* for the presentation and the neat thing is, you don’t really notice the AJAX’ed bits, just that the site is clipping along as fast as you can click.

The most impressive of the AJAX’ed bits is the single screen check out process called One Page™ which allows real-time validation of personal data and responsive on-the-fly adjustment of product configurations (color, size etc.).

While not quite released yet, … the product is announced and generated a few conversations in the wild including a good question about how do you measure the success of improving an interface with some sort of metric.

Market Researcher Roger L. Cauvin of Austin, Texas who writes on usability and marketing topics in his Cauvin blog, brings this query up in his post on Usability and Single Page One Page …

A company called Elastic Path Software has released a single page checkout technology. Most e-commerce sites lead online shoppers through a sequence of pages to complete a purchase. This framework supposedly uses AJAX to consolidate the sequence into one page.

I haven’t seen a site that uses the technology, so I don’t know if it really improves the user experience. But how would we measure the improvement in user experience? Are the standard usability metrics enough to capture any purported improvement?

BTW, he mentions he found out about this project via Coté’s People over Process blog who posted up a few notes about the One Page project and (Ajax kung-fu masters) nitobi’s involvement.

So anyhow, the answer to “How do you measure the success of user interface improvement?”

In this case, the question to ask to gauge improvement is: “Does it reduce cart abandonment, thus increasing conversions/revenue?” A bit clinical perhaps but that is the aim of One Page, … to help users complete purchases faster and with fewer errors or less confusion. Hence, you’ll see real-time error flags, instantly updated grand totals with shipping and tax and quick additions/edits to addresses, credit cards etc.

Andre from nitobi chimes in with some comments on the construction of the One Page in his post Ajax + ecommerce shopping carts = One Page, …

There’s lots of Ajax goodies that we’ve put together to make this UI really shine. Some of the patterns include: accordion widgets, real-time form field validation, data updates, real-time calculations, subtle transition and fade effects. The whole is UI was built leveraging components from our Ajax framework and I’m excited to get it out in the wild. Performance and page weight (load time) was a huge factor for project success as this is a forward facing public web app as oppose to behind the firewall. eCommerce shoppers aren’t nearly as tolerant as corporate intranet users;-)

{snip}

Also they’ve put together a really slick One Page PDF Data Sheet here.

Once One Page is widely deployed, we’ll find out if One Page is an effective solution to the scourge of cart abandonment, but, after playing with it in some test shopping session, this impatient guy is rather excited.