Sharpe's Opinion
Friday, 30th Jan, 2009
Altering one button on a web page increased the sales from this company’s website by 45%
The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?
…
Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the [Register] button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalized how the retailer only wanted their information to pester them with marketing messages they didn’t want. Some imagined other nefarious purposes of the obvious attempt to invade privacy. (In reality, the site asked nothing during registration that it didn’t need to complete the purchase: name, shipping address, billing address, and payment information.)
Just goes to show, if you’re in business, you should be extremely aware of what puts people off purchasing from your website. I work in this field and I’m always shocked by how little most designers understand the huge impact that their tiny decisions make.
Comments
Thanks for that tip – as you say, it’s that sort of detail that is incredibly useful.
BTW comment box is the right size, the ‘Preview’ is fine, but what I’m typing in the box is in roughly 6pt.
So true.
I remember stopping ever (ever) buying from a then well-known online retailer because on returning to the site for the second or third time, it asked for my email and password. I had exactly the problem they describe – I couldn’t remember either the password or the email address I had used the previous time.
No problem, I thought, I’ll register under a new email address. Except that it then refused the purchase because the credit card I tried to use had been used for a different account (i.e. me, via the account whose password I couldn’t remember). After fuming that the site seemed to be going out of its way to make the purchase difficult for me, I suddenly thought “Hang on; why has it kept my credit card details??”.
That was about ten years ago. I haven’t been back there since.
patently
January 30, 2009 at 5:45 pm