Tonight, I finished up my online Christmas shopping. Posing as the average late-night, glossy-eyed web shopper, I filled my cart at several sites then made my final choices, based only in part on whether or not I’d racked up an order large enough to score free shipping.
In doing so, I completed several checkout experiences which were of course quite similar. But this one was a “duh” surprise.
A Brilliant Checkout Workflow
I remember quite well from my days in-house the level of time, energy and testing that goes into designing the checkout process at most organizations, so I’m normally hesitant to criticize. Yet this was a real doozy — truly much to ignore.
When I indicated that I was a guest, I was led in to input my email address, name, and other basic credentials. In the following step, I input my shipping address, as expected – nothing too outrageous. Next, billing address. I was a little disappointed when I didn’t have the option to check a box for “Same as Shipping Address”, but it wasn’t a deal-killer.
But then, it happened. As I tab-select-tabbed along, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a series of unfamiliar characters.
And why, on the states, dropdown, were there only 9 options? How was I to proceed?
Shopping Cart Location Dropdowns
It probably took me only 30 seconds or so to realize that the FOLLOWING field, country, was defaulted to the first alphabetical listing – Australia – and that I was therefore seeing the states and territories of Down Under listed in alphabetical order on THIS field.
I tabbed down to the Country field, changed the selected to United States, and was then able to select Texas as my state.
I understand the reason for their sequence – when writing out an address, country typically comes last. But it’s a big miss for a country with a multi-national user base.
But I didn’t do so without marveling at the huge user experience miss I’d just encountered. If I was my mother (or one of the large chunk of less savvy users) I’d have given up when I couldn’t find Texas in the dropdown. I’d have called my son or sister or friend and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t get <you, your son, your husband> that gift he wanted because that website is not meant for people in the United States.” And the store would have lost a pretty significant order.
Today’s many user experience lessons
- If Form B is almost exactly like Form A, allow the user to copy their previous entries over.
- If some great technical limitation prevents you from letting users copy previous entries over, at least duplicate Form A accurately in Form B.
- Never pre-populate a field unless the vast majority of users will find it beneficial, and no users will find it deal-breakingly confusing.
- If your web forms progressively disclose or populate, be sure that they do so in the expected order.
- Consider a design that makes it clear to the user which fields inform which.
Tune in soon for the next user experience surprise — a new element/pattern that I’m still undecided on.
In the meantime, have you encountered any interesting user experiences in your holiday shopping?
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