| Articles Home |
Here is the third look at the The Nostalgia Zone comic shop web design, a less quick and dirty comic book store site with every iteration done with my interpretation of Jakob Nielsen, as found on http://www.useit.com/. The main goal is still to have a low tech, easily maintainable site that could actually be used by humans.
The customers kept asking for credit cards on the web, we delivered. So credit card information is now taken on the site. A "secure" https form, another very small cgi ( the other is the search) and done. Security is actually very weak on a cheap shared host service, but by using an scp client to get the card info off the host every day and then clearing the information from the host we limit exposure of sensitive data and minimize risk. While adding the credit card form several rounds of Jakob Nielsen style user testing were done for the ordering process. Vastly simplied order instructions were the result, as well as a set of quick reference information on the Home page for repeat customers. Phone numbers, hours, etc. The ORDER information link was made much larger than other links, so people could see it better and many other small changes were made that had large effects on completed order rates. What are the results? It sells more stuff.
Neilsen's test methods are quick and easy, test rounds were run on three to five users, each user tested about 15-20 minutes. User problems with the ordering and credit card were quickly found, corrected and tested again.