November 23, 2009
10 typical Search & Navigation Dead-Ends
One of the key challenges in providing a positive customer experience online is to avoid the so-called “dead-ends”, defined as “the unsuccessful attempts to find a product or information” by Jacques Nantel, the well-known Professor of the Department of Marketing of HEC Montréal:
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When shopping for a product or searching for information on a website, it may take several attempts for consumers to find what they are looking for. It is suggested that these unsuccessful attempts to find a product or information, i.e., dead-ends, influence consumers’ perception and evaluation of the website usability. Results of this study, conducted with 204 consumers over two different sites, suggest that there is a negative relationship between the number of dead-ends experienced by consumers while shopping online and the perception of the website usability. In addition, contrary to popular belief, a positive relationship was found between the number of pages visited by consumers and their evaluation of the website usability. [...] |
The influence of Dead-Ends on perceived website usability
The approach described in the above reference relies on supervised test with over 200 users and is a statistical approach to identify and quantify the dead-ends in a collection of selected web-sites.
I will discuss here some simple methods which can be used to illustrate some Search & Navigation Dead-Ends without any guarantee that they correspond to frequent dead-ends, nor that they represent the majority of the cases, but which do not require any statistical data to identify. The points here-under should therefore be only considered as a checklist to exemplify typical search & navigation dead-ends to open the discussion with a new party on a concrete basis. Advanced statistical tests - like “Clickstream” described in the research above - are highly recommended to validate the significance of the cases of these methods.
