Digital Amour

In an earlier post,  I highlighted Luke Wroblewski and his suggested approach to real-time form feedback.  Providing inline validation can prove to be a small-win for site designers as it eliminates purchase barriers and fosters users through the perceptually obtrusive task of form completion.  Amazingly enough, it’s often the small design tweaks that result in the biggest gains for both the user and the brand.

Prior to writing, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (released May 2008), Wroblewski asked friend, Jared Spool, for an example where a change in design paid dividends for the business.  Spool responded, “You mean like $300 million of new revenue?”  Continuing to share his story, Spool speaks of a major eCommerce site and a simple design improvement to their checkout process that paid the business approximately $45 million in the first month and $300 million the first year following implementation.  Simply put, a checkout experience that many deemed user-centric and easy, was a roadblock for visitors and resulting in site drop-off.  Informed by usability testing, designers were able to target the culprit — a pesky button!!  As Spool chronicles, it’s during the most critical times (in this instance, form completion) that the small wins can pay the greatest dividends.

Visit http://bit.ly/1p3MEk for Spool’s full account.