Problem: Creating an account
Several sites confused customers by making parts of their sign-in or registration process too prominent to new customers. For example, some sites required customers to register before they could make a purchase. The registration process prevented many customers from buying the products they had added to the shopping cart.
In Gap.com's case, the site confused customers by reminding them that they had not yet signed in to their account. The Gap.com home page contains this text at the top of the page: "You are not signed in".
Several shoppers noticed this text because it loaded first. Because the rest of the page, consisting mostly of graphics, loaded slowly over the dialup modem, "You are not signed in" appeared by itself for several seconds while the other page elements loaded.
While no customers actually left the Gap.com site because of the text, it certainly didn't enhance the customer experience, as shown in these comments:
- One shopper on Gap.com said the message "means I can't get access to the site."
- Another commented that when the message "pops up, I think the page isn't going to show up."
Another problem occurs on Buy.com's home page, which urges customers to "create an account to get started"
Buy.com seems more concerned with pushing registration than with showing customers products. Why would a shopper sign up before knowing what the site offers? As on Gap.com, it's not a good idea to distract new customers with prominent reminders about accounts and signing in.
A much worse problem on Buy.com occurs when a new customer finishes adding products to the shopping cart and clicks "Check Out": the site immediately requires new customers to create an account before they can proceed. New customers, credit card in hand, hardly want to "create an account" just for the privilege of giving the site their money. They want to proceed in the checkout process.
To make matters even worse, Buy.com's first Create My Account page includes "Account Type," a required field: Buy.com should remove the Account Type field, since there is no benefit to customers by completing the field. And there is no benefit to Buy.com, either; if customers get confused by the field or otherwise leave Account Type incomplete, the Buy.com Web site prevents them from going any further in the checkout process. (At this point on Buy.com, one exacerbated shopper said, "Where do you just buy it?")
Barnes&Noble also includes in its checkout process a required field that shouldn't be there. The checkout page asks customers, "For future reference, please name this address". Unlike the Buy.com Account Type field, the "name this address" field could be helpful to shoppers on a return visit to bn.com. But like the Account Type field, there's no reason for it to be a required field. Again, any customer who is confused by the field and leaves it empty is prevented from going further in the checkout process.
In tests, the idea of naming an address was unclear to customers, despite Barnes&Noble's example ("e.g. Home"). One customer asked, "Please name this address? What does that mean?" BestBuy.com confused several customers by asking them to create a password hint. This was not a required field, but it did confuse customers with its lengthy instructions.
Here's how the process is supposed to work:
- Customers select a personal question to be asked in case they forget their password, and tell BestBuy the answer to the question.
- The answer to that question should be something other than their BestBuy password.
- If a return customer clicks "Forgot your password? Get help here", the site will ask him his personal question. A correct answer will permit the customer to log on.
Some customers simply did not understand what BestBuy was asking of them. One said, "I am thinking maybe they mean to put in a fake password."
