Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales

Imagine you’re downtown and you want to buy a Kraftwerk CD.

You visit Tower Records, go to the Electronic section, find category K, locate Kraftwerk, and select their Tour De France CD. Great! You’re off to the checkout and…

Hang on. Where’s the checkout?

They’ve moved it to the second floor. When you get there, you hand over you credit card. Big mistake. You should have registered downstairs first.

You head back down to the basement. Do you have two copies of your ID? No. “But it’s only a $9.99 CD!” you argue. The store stands firm. Wonderful music though it is, you’re soon off to a store that’s more conducive to purchasing.

This scenario may be a little far-flung, but if you’ve ever shopped online, you’ve probably had a similar experience at some point. You wanted to buy something, were ready to use your credit card… but the process was so excruciating that you gave up.

You might have the slickest site on the block, but if users can’t figure it out, you won’t make a sale.

Over recent years, the Web has matured from a simple functionality like browsing to being able to cater to intricate processes such as end-to-end financial transactions. During this period, technologies have grown more sophisticated, users have come to require a richer experience, and companies have found numerous ways to generate sales online.

Indeed, when it comes to building a successful ecommerce Website, several areas, such as the design, content, products, incentives, and banner ads all contribute to turn surfers into shoppers.
Where Information Architecture can Help
Every Web designer knows that regardless of how nice an ecommerce site looks, unless the shopping process works, users will abandon it and go elsewhere.

The creation of an effective shopping cart—and everything else that’s related to the buying experience—poses challenges that are very different from programming the site. These issues can be addressed by applying the basic principles of Information Architecture, which offer several tools to refine the process and ensure that the overall business objectives of the site are met.

Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective. Tidy navigation, meaningful labels, and consistent screens all help enhance the shopping experience.
One of the first things to organize in a site’s design is its navigation structure. This involves defining the optimal routes by which a user might pass from one location to the next.

Alternatively, if you’re overhauling an ecommerce site, you need to identify where users are getting lost by studying their navigation trails, and noting the most frequent entrance and exit routes. The exit page can be very interesting. By examining these pages, you can start to determine:

• What caused the users to leave?
• What’s missing from the page (e.g. further instructions)?
• What message were they expecting, that did not appear?
• What instructions or messages confused them?

Shopping Cart Design

Shopping carts are notoriously complex to design. A cart might look simple when it works correctly, but when even a single step is missing or incorrect, the whole process is undermined. Regardless of whether you get the rest of the site right, if this area doesn’t work, your time and effort may be wasted.

We’ve all heard the expression ‘business critical’, but for an ecommerce site it really is critical that you give shoppers every chance—and then some more—to complete their online purchases.

Here's a selection of the most important areas in which you can make valuable amendments to your shopping cart. AFter that, we'll look at a few suggestions for research that will allow you to go beyond what's presented in this article as you improve your site.