Harnessing your IT case study

B2B e-commerce case study – harnessing IT resources to market your products

To design a usable web interface for your online showroom you must begin with an analysis of the tasks your customers need to carry out using your site. After that you can find how to reduce the guesswork and ‘information stress’ associated with carrying out those tasks. This will create an experience that makes it easy and profitable to transact with you – rather than a confusing chore.

The problem:

A consumer goods manufacturer was developing a B2B e-commerce site to enable its clients to place and track orders online. They were working with an established ERP developer to design the interface. Even though the manufacturing company knew what it wanted, and the developers had a robust, scalable and flexible system, the first version of the interface clearly wasn’t right. Everyone knew there were problems, but the company’s sales support staff found they lacked the expertise to define the concerns and identify specific and workable solutions.

Both parties to the design of the site were too close to it to grasp the real problems. The sales support staff knew the catalogue structure too well, and the developers knew the functionality of the system too well – as a result neither could understand why a first-time site user might not understand the online interface that they were seeing.

So the manufacturers called in Wired’s user experience consultant to act as a third party ‘circuit-breaker’. This is the value of involving a ‘user advocate’ in the design process.

The solution:

The user experience expert could see where the trouble was. There were three main problem areas:

•  Information architecture issues
• GUI design issues in the public pages
• GUI design issues in the e-commerce pages.

Basically the catalogue had been arranged in a structure that worked when read as a list on a page. When presented as a menu and a sequence of web pages, users found it confusing. In addition, the screens involved in the process of logging in and making an order did not explain to users where to go next. As a result these processes were likely to present many ‘stress points’ where customers could not tell what they should do.

The client company thought the catalogue made sense because they knew it inside out – but presented screen-by-screen it was not easy to navigate through. Having the third party to represent the users’ needs and communicate these to both the client and the developers produced a great outcome – one that was in everybody’s interest.

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