Irving firm helps companies help Web customers

Dot.com businesses are spending millions on marketing to attract interest, but they're probably not paying nearly enough attention to what happens once customers arrive at their Web sites.<br><br>The

Wednesday, April 12th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Dot.com businesses are spending millions on marketing to attract interest, but they're probably not paying nearly enough attention to what happens once customers arrive at their Web sites.

The evidence: Abandoned shopping carts plague most retailers on the Internet.
Imagine you walked into your local grocery store and found half-filled carts strewn about the place, as frustrated customers fled for the exits without bothering to check out the very things that they walked into the place to buy.

Now imagine that's what happens every day at your Web site.

What's an e-tailer to do?

A company can flood the airwaves and magazines with more advertising and hope that more people show up. This approach is rapidly falling out of fashion, as venture-capital financing dries up for unprofitable online retailers.

Or they can improve the design of their Web sites, so that more visits translate into more purchases - and revenue that could even lead to profits.

Friendlier design is the goal at Usability Sciences Corp. in Irving, which is helping businesses look more critically at their Web sites, seeing them through their customers' eyes instead of through the design guru's.

The company started in 1988 serving the computer software industry, but now it does most of its work for Internet operations.

"We've done more of this than anyone on the planet," said Jeff Schueler, the company's president. Usability Sciences' customers for Internet-related services include American Airlines, Drugstore.com, GroceryWorks.com, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, JCPenney.com, Monster.com and Procter & Gamble.

For about $15,000, Usability will bring 10 consumers into its lab and ask them to go through a series of tasks on the client's Web site.

At a travel site, for example, a consumer might be asked to make a round-trip reservation from Dallas to New York, select a seat, book a hotel, then go back and change the reservation in some way.

While the consumer is going through the series of tasks, Usability Sciences' analysts, and often the site's designers, sit in an adjacent room and monitor the activity through a one-way mirror.

"We watch everything they do, and we know what they're supposed to be doing," said Mr. Schueler. "We're looking for usage patterns, extracting what they find difficult and where they stumble."

The results can be disappointing to site designers, who often watch consumers flounder.

If there is any single message from Usability Sciences, it's to keep the site simple.

Customers aren't nearly as impressed as site designers by bold graphics and fancy Java animations. They simply want to get the tasks done.

Another important lesson is to keep the most important functions toward the top of a Web page.

"Some people don't know how to scroll down a page," said Scott Kincaid, the company's director of usability services.

The use of color is important, too. Some important functions for a site can be hard to find if they don't stand out from other information on the page.

Often, the designer will make changes to the site on the fly after several people struggle over the same task.

Grocery sites can be particularly difficult to design well, Mr. Schueler says, and the company has done work for HomeGrocer.com and Webvan, in addition to GroceryWorks.com.
What's so tricky about groceries? For one thing, customers are more likely to grow impatient with small flaws as they build shopping lists that are loaded with dozens of items. What's more, food categories can be difficult to define. How many categories are optimal on a single Web page? Where exactly should mustard reside?

Mr. Schueler says it turns out that most customers could shop much faster with online grocers if they simply used the search function for each item. But most people seem to prefer to duplicate the physical store experience, he says, and they browse through each aisle, loading individual items into their virtual grocery carts.

Web sites can improve their searching capabilities, he adds, so that a customer looking for peanut butter doesn't have to browse through a long list of unrelated products that include either the words peanut or butter.

At GroceryWorks.com, Usability Sciences helped the company change the colors of certain icons and move them into different positions to help customers navigate the site more easily, says Mike Puls, a senior vice president for the Dallas-based company.

"We took their feedback very seriously," he says. When customers are buying 50 or 60 items, "You're asking for a much greater commitment on the part of the user. We have to make it faster for them to go in and buy, to reduce the number of clicks they have to make."

Technology editor Alan Goldstein writes about the Internet and electronic commerce for The Dallas Morning News. His e-mail address is agoldstein@dallasnews.com.