E-Commerce User Experience

207 design guidelines to improve the usability (and thus the conversion rate) for e-commerce sites. Richly illustrated with 221 color screenshots of designs that worked particularly well or that caused problems for shoppers.

All the design guidelines are based on findings from detailed usability studies of twenty e-commerce sites with real users in the United States and Europe, showing what they did as they shopped on real e-commerce sites.

Covers the following topics:

• Category pages (including homepages)
• Product pages, product descriptions, product photos
• Shopping carts, checkout, and registration
• Search
• Selling strategies, cross-sales, recommendations
• Trust and credibility
• International users
• Test methodology used in this research; how to run your own usability studies

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. is principal of Nielsen Norman Group. He is the founder of the discount usability engineering movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces.

Nielsen, noted as "the world's leading expert on Web usability" by U.S. News and World Report; and "the next best thing to a true time machine" by USA Today, is the author of the best-selling book "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity," which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include "Usability Engineering," "Usability Inspection Methods," "Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond," "International User Interfaces," "Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed," "Prioritizing Web Usability," and "Eyetracking Web Usability."

Nielsen s Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 at www.useit.com and currently has about 200,000 readers.

From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute.

Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.