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Usability reflections: The failure of search in online stores

Started by Jure Cuhalev · 9 months ago

Source: ShutterstockRecently my Sennheiser headphones died after a decade of everyday abuse. I wanted to buy something similar in about 100 Eur class. Sadly the two biggest Slovenian stores failed to help me locate a perfect new pair in a number of ways.
I started with EnaA and entered into thei ... Continue reading »

3 comments

  • Hi! Aren't Sennheiser headphone so cool!?

    I have worked in usability with a number of online stores before. The biggest issue that they have is that the product vendors are often in control of the content that describes each product in the store's database and they are sometimes even responsible for the metadata.

    For the store to reinput and check all the data is often very resource heavy and is not done.

    I'm sure that some 'monkey' was requested to enter the content and few controls are in place from a UC point of view.

    To fix this issueI have a number of suggestions to online shops:
    1) do it yourself
    2) by a better search engine that take into account spelling errors etc
    3) provide your vendors with a set of guidelines, templates or even a system that controls the content about each product.

    Any other ideas?
  • Great suggestions James,

    I'd say maybe:

    4) Have a feedback loop built-into system (ISO 9000 style) that ensures that the questions received through emails and phone support get addressed in future revisions of product data and as part of normal iterative site development.

    5) Maybe do usability reviews of the competition and then check the problems list against own site?
  • Good points Jure, we'll make sure to include them into our product development cycle. Regarding misspelling correction, we did have a prototype in place a while ago, but never got around into implementing it. So thanks for kicking us and reminding us to do it now. I'll let you know when we do ;)

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