[Sigia-l] Shopping Basket

[darin sullivan]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 3:03 AM, Louise Hewitt <louise.hewitt at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have inherited a high-profile ecom project, and the solution has been designed so that there is no dedicated page for the shopping basket content (the basket can only be viewed in an auxillary 'flap' that layers over the page content anchored and triggered from an icon in the header.
>
> The abscence of a dedicated page to 'view your basket' is making me edgy. I'm not super-experience with e-com design, so I'm hoping there are some experts out there who have been through this before and can help:
>

Hi Louise... Since you inherited this project, are there design and
(better yet) usability test artifacts that you can review? What
rationale has been expressed for using an overlay to display contents
of the cart? I think that your intuition serves you well here, in
making you "edgy."

Overlay windows are inherently modal, and as such, usually mean that
they behave differently than a normal browser window in response to
user action. If the different behavior is desired by the business,
with a clearly articulated rationale for how that behavior will
produce a better experience or more revenue for the business, then
great. Your team has something that will allow you to measure the
overlay cart's success.

My own experience with presenting users with modal behavior,
especially for e-com, has been to "increase conversion." However,
users can quickly become confused when "normal" pages are supplanted.
You've probably experienced examples of this yourself when making
service or subscription purchases. Persistent navigation will
disappear, browser back buttons becomes disabled, and so on.
Unfortunately, from a business standpoint, these tactics have proven
to be effective, for a certain demographic.

> 1 - is there an obvious bear trap in not including a dedicated cart-view page?
> 2 - has anyone got anecdotal or concrete evidence of user acceptance of overlay cart views?
> 3 - anything else that you think might come and bite my behind.

Despite being armed with relevant, pertinent, examples or data that
demonstrate modal tactics are problematic, business managers will
argue that the material you cite is not relevant to their specific
situation, industry, product, customer, etc. The single best thing
that I can recommend, to help you avoid having your behind bitten, is
to do testing, early, with actual customers.