$138.50 for the entire series, as a 389
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all nine reports
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9 reports, PDF format (1 per report)
Download Individual Reports (from esellerate)
$45 for a single report, $99 for each report and the right to place on your intranet and make unlimited copies within your organization. (No S/H will be added for downloads.)
Summary
The reports contain extensive guidelines for how to design e-commerce sites to make them more usable.
See the descriptions for the individual reports below for more information.
Richly illustrated with 221 color screenshots of designs that worked particularly well or that caused problems for shoppers.
This report distills the data from our major international usability study into the essence of e-commerce, discussing the strategic implications of our findings for the future of e-commerce. This is the report to give to your boss if he or she doesn't have time to read the detailed reports.
Category pages organize and prioritize a site's offerings. Home pages are one type of category page. Some home pages clearly show what the site sells, but others confuse users by obscuring the purpose of the site. Product listing pages can be tricky to design because they must provide the right amount of information, and organize it well. 28 design guidelines.
Users need sufficient information about a product before purchasing it online. Product pages provide that information using a combination of text and images. Effective product pages show availability, product options, and total cost. Good images also matter. 30 design guidelines.
Filling out forms correctly during shopping is very difficult for most users. Forcing people to register during their first purchase is a confusing and frustrating tactic that drives customers away. Better designs mean more customers can complete the shopping process. 32 design guidelines.
Many of our users went right to the site's search tool (unless it was hidden) but there were several reasons search didn't always help them. How to improve search results and search pages in product catalogs. 29 design guidelines.
Some sites drive their customers away with high prices, unreasonable shipping costs, or unavailable items. Sites that learn to avoid these problems can then focus on tactics for achieving additional sales through cross-selling, recommendations, and gift-giving. 47 design guidelines.
Trust is the user's willingness to risk time, money, and personal data on a website. This report discusses many factors that can enhance (or damage) an e-commerce site's credibility. 34 design guidelines.
When US-based sites go global, many aspects of the user experience get broken. This report focuses on not only the obvious issues such as address formats, but also cultural issues as well. Based on usability tests of European users. 19 design guidelines.
This report details how we conducted this study, including a summary of user demographics, how we briefed and interacted with users, and a summary of all the tasks. No design guidelines, but plenty of advice for running your own tests.
Note: If you add up the number of guidelines in the individual reports then the result is more than 207. However, this is the true total since some of the guidelines are discussed in more than one report.
The reports were written and the usability studies were conducted by an international team of four leading usability specialists led by Dr. Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group. The team members have 50 years' combined experience in usability in general and 20 years' combined experience in Web usability.
Everybody we have talked with recommended charging a thousand dollars for each of the E-Commerce User Experience reports. First, this is the price that traditional "analyst companies" charge for their reports, and second, any e-commerce site would gain many times more in increased sales from even the smallest improvement in usability. If there is even a single one of our guidelines that a site has overlooked in its design, it would make several thousand dollars from following that one bit of advice.
We have defied our advisors and stuck to a low price for several reasons:
Please help us continue publishing low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read a report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.
This report has timely and important information for anybody responsible for an e-commerce site and interested in increasing the conversion rate.
Running a similar usability study yourself to collect comparative design lessons from a large number of websites around the world would cost thousands more than the cost of these reports, not to mention months of effort by your team of experienced usability professionals.