Jakob Nielsen recently wrote an article “Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous…” In it he proposes that many Web 2.0 trends are not only useless for web users but can actually cut into your profits.

He covered a lot of ground (definitely check out the article) and made a lot of good points. But a couple things don’t sit too well with me.

Nielsen Bashes AJAX

Nielsen argues AJAX and rich user interfaces are too complicated for the average user. Even though AJAX makes it easier to get more done on one page without reloading, it’s easy for people to miss the subtle changes on the page and think nothing happened. This could be a problem for “add to cart” and “checkout” processes. He recommends you stick with the old-school, page-by-page way of doing things.

“Users often overlooked modest changes, such as when they added something to the cart and it updated only a small area in a corner of the screen. It’s deadly for e-commerce sites when users can’t operate the shopping cart, so it’s usually best to stick to simple shopping-cart designs that everybody understands.”

Kudos to Howard Kaplan over at GrokDotCom for pointing out the fallacy of Nielsen’s arguments.

“Aren’t websites “more usable” today than they were then? Absolutely. So, a better question for Jakob would be, with so many of the top sites focusing on usability for so many years, why aren’t Conversion Rates any higher? According to the latest Shop.org numbers, they’re not even trending upward.

If he’s right, and the “web is a tool” users, as most usability practitioners would like to call your site’s visitors (can you think of any positive meanings to the word ‘users’?), attempt to accomplish tasks, Conversion Rates (the ratio of actions taken per total visitors) should have risen each-and-every year (until, naturally, the big-bad Web2.0 trend came to bring them crashing down).”

Continue Reading:
Jakob Nielsen Thinks Web 2.0 Sucks. Is He Right? »

Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader from Bloor Research, published an interesting article about how paying attention to site accessibility will improve the shopping experience for impaired users as well as the Internet community at large. In his article “Improved Accessible Search with Elastic Path” at IT Analysis, Mr. Abrahams outlines a few scenarios and explains navigation methods used by impaired shoppers and suggests a few key enhancements - i.e. product specific page URLs and relevant landing pages and accurate titles and descriptions - to help relevant pages float to the top of the search engine rankings.

In his narrative, Peter also advises optimizing your ecommerce store for web visitors using screen readers or speech recognition for text input by using filterable search results plus breadcrumbs navigation history as well as allowing multiple ways to search (i.e. by SKU, name, brand etc.) and holds up Elastic Path’s Optimize technology used in BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services as an example.

BEA have recently announced a new version of AquaLogic Commerce Server which includes search engine optimisation technologies from Elastic Path which will help the searcher with a disability as well as the time-poor searcher.

Elastic Path - Optimize - ensures that pages are well formed for the search engine spiders to gather complete and accurate index information.

And there are more benefits too … by making your shop easier to navigate and making ‘longtail’ product pages more findable, you will be greatly appreciated by the shopper with a disability who hates browsing through dozens of useless search results - as well as enjoying more fruitful organic search results with fantastic ROI leading to a wider audience across the Internet.

As Abrahams puts forth,

I also believe that designing the searches with impaired users in mind will highlight any usability issues and hence further improve the experience for the whole e-buyer community.

Additional Reading on this topic:

Peter Abrahams’ Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation article and Massive business case for accessibility