(First published January 20th 2006 as part of the IMRG Annual Report)

The increasing take up of usability and design best practice by e-commerce over the last few years is finally beginning to pay dividends. The IMRG predict 5 billion pounds transacted online by 24 million people for Christmas 2005. E-commerce has hit the mass-market, big time. It is no longer a struggle to shop online. And customers are voting with their wallets, so when an online store provides a good customer experience it will thrive.

So if usability brings good experiences, and good experiences bring happy online shoppers and more sales, where should businesses be concentrating their usability efforts in 2006?

This can’t be right, surely? I differ from you in my personality, my psychology, my motivations, my context, my life. And I buy a television in quite a different way than I buy a book

So far this century, the usability profession have taken a ‘defensive’ approach to usability. Focus has been to get rid of barriers to sales, remove interface inconsistency and to consolidate a simple, common sales process. This has been a highly successful model. But it makes substantial assumptions about both people and processes, specifically that:

• all people think, act and decide in the same way, and;
• all online products can be sold using the same sales process.

But this can’t be right, surely? I differ from you in my personality, my psychology, my motivations, my context, my life. And I buy a television in quite a different way than I buy a book.

So for 2006, I predict that a more proactive, less defensive usability will help businesses to start to accommodate prospects and customers with different wants, needs and motivations, and match them with products with different sales processes. A salesperson would not sell a fast car to a middle aged man in the same way as they would sell a mid-range digital camera to a teenager. A good salesperson would listen, learn and adapt their conversation and sales process to suit.

How? For sales processes, companies typically know the best ways to sell the things they have in store, but to make it work online requires a translation into web site design. In our example of cars and cameras, the first might ‘sell the dream’, the second ‘convenience, ease and fun’. But it will be a sequence of web pages that adapts to the prospect with decision points, micro-closes, encouragement and persuasion. As for the psychological angle, perhaps the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Index (MBTi) formulations can offer us a framework for thinking about this. MBTi describes differences rather than similarities, differences in how people interact with others, assimilate information, make rational or instinctive decisions and run their lives.

Skilled salespeople adapt their process and conversations according to the individual they are talking to and the product that they are selling. So why can’t we design our online stores to do the same? Different people want different things, and want to shop in different ways. In 2006 I predict a more proactive, sales oriented usability will be working on difference and diversity, and using these positively to happy customers and even better business.