Archive for year: 2020

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/07/ecommerce-shipping-inventory-alerts/

Removing Panic From E-Commerce Shipping And Inventory Alerts

Removing Panic From E-Commerce Shipping And Inventory Alerts

Suzanne Scacca

2020-07-09T11:00:00+00:00
2020-07-09T16:34:18+00:00

When it comes to displaying shipping and inventory alerts on an e-commerce website, you have to be very careful about inciting panic in your shoppers.

“Item is out of stock.”

“Expect shipping delays.”

“Page does not exist.”

These words alone are enough to turn a pleasant shopping experience into a panicked and frustrating one.

You have to be very careful about how you design these notices on your site, too. You obviously want to inform visitors of changes that impact their shopping experience, but you don’t want panic to be the resulting emotion when your alert is seen.

Better Search UX

For large-scale and e-commerce sites, the search experience is an increasingly critical tool. You can vastly improve the experience for users with thoughtful microcopy and the right contextualization. Read a related article →

When people panic, the natural response is to find a way to regain some control over the situation. The problem is, that regained control usually comes at the expense of the business’s profits, trust, and customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, some of the design choices we make in terms of alerts can cause undue panic.

“

If you want to better control your shoppers’ responses and keep them on the path to conversion, keep reading.

Note: Because the following post was written during the coronavirus pandemic, many of the alerts you’re going to see are related to it. However, that doesn’t mean these tips aren’t valid for other panic-inducing situations — like when a storm destroys an area and it’s impossible to order anything in-store or online or like during the November shopping frenzy when out-of-stock inventory is commonplace.

1. Avoid Out-Of-Stock Notices When Possible

Colleen Kirk is a professor of marketing at the New York Institute of Technology and an expert on territorial shopping.

She has a great analogy to help us understand why this happens:

Have you ever felt as if another driver stole your parking spot or were upset when someone else nabbed the last sweater that you had your eye on? If so, you experienced psychological ownership. You can feel psychological ownership over pretty much anything that doesn’t belong to you, from the last chocolate truffle in a display case to the dream home you found on Zillow and even intangible things like ideas.

When it comes to shopping in person, people exhibit territorial shopping traits by placing their items in a shopping cart. Or when they put a separator bar between their items on a conveyor belt and the person’s behind them.

We don’t really have that luxury on a website. The best we can do is enable shoppers to save their items to their cart or a wishlist, but that doesn’t keep the items from selling out before they have a chance to buy them.

This can lead to huge problems, especially when a shopper has gotten excited about that toy or shirt they “put aside”, only to discover a few hours later that the item is gone or no longer available.

The worst thing you could do is to remove out-of-stock product pages. You don’t want shoppers running into a 404 page and experiencing not just panic but also confusion and frustration.

While not as bad, I’d also recommend against displaying an inactive “Sold Out” or “Out of Stock” notice or button to shoppers as Olivela has done here:

The Olivela website displays an inactive ‘Sold Out’ button for its denim mask product. (Source: Olivela) (Large preview)

Seeing this kind of feels like Google Maps directing you to your destination, only for you to end up at the edge of a lake where there’s supposed to be a road.

“Why the heck did you even send me here?”, is what your shoppers are going to wonder. And then they’re going to have to turn around and try to find something comparable to buy instead.

There are better ways to handle this that will also reduce the chances of your shoppers panic-buying a second-rate substitute for the item they really wanted. And this plays into the idea of territorial shopping (but in a healthy way).

This is what Target does when an item is “temporarily out of stock”:

Target provides shoppers with the option to get notified when out-of-stock items become available. (Source: Target) (Large preview)

Rather than display an unclickable button and just completely shut down shoppers’ hopes of getting the item, a “Notify me when it’s back” button is presented. This is a more positive approach to handling out-of-stock inventory and, if customers really want the item, they’re more likely to use it rather than settle for something else or try another site altogether. (I’ll talk about the “Pick it up” option down below.)

Another way you can handle this is to do what Summersalt does and turn your “Sold Out” button into a “Pre-order” one:

Summersalt provides shoppers with ‘Pre-order’ button for out-of-stock items. (Source: Summersalt) (Large preview)

What’s nice about this button is that it not only empowers shoppers to secure the currently unavailable item they have their eyes on, but it tells them exactly when they will get it.

So, if you know when inventory will be restored, this is a better option than the “Notify” button as there’s more transparency about availability.

2. Don’t Over-Promise Or Give Your Shoppers False Hope

It’s a good idea to keep your shoppers informed about how external situations may impact their online shopping experience. And you can use key areas like the website’s sticky banner or a promotional banner on the homepage to do that.

That said, be very careful what you promote.

Special notices aren’t the kinds of things that get ignored the way that cookie consent notices or lead generation pop-ups do.

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Consumers know to look at these areas for things like promo codes and sales event details.

If you put anything else in there, you better make sure the notice is positive, useful and truthful.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on with the Gap website:

Gap’s ‘Taking Care Takes Time’ notice addresses shipping delays due to COVID-19. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

Gap has three notices that appear in the header of its site:

In black: “Free shipping on $25+, free returns on all orders.”
In white: “Taking Care Takes Time. We’ve implemented special procedures as we work to keep our teams — and you — safe, so shipping of orders may be delayed.”
In blue: “Extra 50% off markdowns + more.”

It’s overwhelming. And it’s almost as if they wanted the alert in the middle to be ignored (or missed altogether) as it’s sandwiched between two very sharp-looking banners that promote attractive deals.

If your alert is related to something that’s going to affect the shoppers’ experience, don’t bury it and don’t try to massage it with overly optimistic messaging. Also, don’t contradict it with another alert that suggests the first one isn’t one to worry about.

Here’s why I say that:

Gap promotes ‘Our Masks are Back’ on the homepage of its website. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

This message is problematic for a couple of reasons. For one, Gap’s masks aren’t really “back” if they’re only available for pre-order. Second, it runs contrary to the top banner’s message about shipping delays.

Unsurprisingly, shoppers did not react well to this hyped-up announcement:

Gap receives an extraordinary amount of backlash on Facebook over mismanagement of shipping and promotions. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

When Facebook ran a promotion on Facebook about the masks, it received a huge amount of backlash from customers. Many customers didn’t want to hear about the masks because they’d been waiting over a month for existing orders to ship and couldn’t get a customer service rep to talk to them. There were also complaints about items being canceled from their orders, only for them to magically become “available” again in the store.

A website that’s handling similar circumstances well right now is Urban Outfitters:

Urban Outfitters is focusing on the positive of a bad situation. (Source: Urban Outfitters) (Large preview)

Urban Outfitters, like a lot of non-essential retailers right now, has had to make some adjustments in order to stay alive. But rather than displaying a notice alerting online shoppers to shipping delays like many of its counterparts, Urban Outfitters has turned it into a positive.

The banner reads: “Your local UO is now offering curbside pickup!”

There’s no hidden message here that tries to explain away the brand’s bad behavior. There’s no greedy cash-grab, promising deep discounts for people who shop with them despite likely delays in shipping. There’s no overhyping of a promise they can’t possibly keep.

This is an actionable offer.

What I’d suggest for e-commerce businesses that want to keep customers on their side — even during a tumultuous time — is to keep their alerts simple, honest and useful. And if you’re going to promote multiple ones, make sure they tell the same story.

3. Soften The Blow By Promoting Multichannel Options

I recently signed a new lease on an apartment but was dismayed to discover that my move-in date and furniture delivery date wouldn’t line up because of shipping delays. I was well-aware of this when I made the purchase, but I wasn’t as prepared as I wanted to be. And because we were in the middle of a city-wide lockdown, I was unable to crash with friends who live over the state border.

I thought, “I’ll sleep on an air mattress. No biggie.” But then remembered I left mine behind in Delaware. So, I had to figure out a way to buy a cheap air mattress.

All of my go-to e-commerce websites had shipping delay alerts. And as I perused their available products (which there were very few), my panic only worsened. Until I discovered a website that offered BOPIS.

Buy-online-pickup-in-store is a shopping trend that’s proven very popular with consumers. According to data from Doddle and a report from Business Insider:

68% of U.S. shoppers have used BOPIS on numerous occasions.
50% have chosen where to shop based on BOPIS availability.
Shipping costs (avoiding them), speed and convenience are the primary reasons why customers prefer to buy online and shop in-store. It’s the best of both worlds.

If you’re building an e-commerce site for a company with retail locations that do this, then make sure you get customers thinking about it right away.

Barnes and Noble, for instance, enables shoppers to set their preferred local store:

Barnes & Noble allows shoppers to set their preferred retail store location. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is a great feature to have. The only thing I’d do differently is to place a button in the header of the site that immediately takes them to the “Change My Store” or “Find Store” pop-up or page. That way, shoppers don’t have to wait until they’ve found a product they like to discover whether or not it’s available at their store for pickup.

Once a user has set their store location, though, Barnes & Noble remembers it and uses it to enhance the remainder of the shopping experience:

Barnes & Noble uses shopper location information to enhance search listings. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is what search listings look like for “Magna Tiles” on the Barnes & Noble site when the user sets their search to “List” view. Pretty neat, right? While “Grid” view is standard, only showing the featured image, product name and price, this view provides extra detail about availability.

This can provide a ton of relief for shoppers who too-often encounter “out-of-stock” or “not available in store” notices on individual product pages. This way, they can spend their time looking at the items they can get the most quickly and conveniently. There are no surprises.

If cross-channel options are available — between website and mobile app, website and retail store, website and third-party delivery service — make sure you call attention to them early on so customers can take advantage of the streamlined shopping experience.

Wrapping Up

Panicked shopping can lead to serious issues for your e-commerce site. Rather than put your shoppers in a situation where they grow impatient, dissatisfied, and frustrated by the site that seems to put up barriers at every turn, design your alerts so that they turn a bad experience into a positive one.

(ra, yk, il)

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2020/07/eye-vs-ai-harnessing-technology-to-successfully-track-user-attention/

Attention is the new gold; brands are in a constant competition for our attention.

A big portion of our time we spend online, where we are bombarded with insane amounts of information and advertisements. It’s hard not to become overwhelmed in this world of consumerism. We have had to become good at quickly evaluating which information is important, especially on the internet.

Good marketing specialists know that they have mere seconds to turn a potential customer into a lead. People are not going to spend a lot of time examining your advertisement or landing page, either it clicks or not. Moreover, most users do not read the articles, they scan them. First impression plays a huge role in the success of your business, so do not leave that to a chance.

You really don’t want your customer to ignore that special sale, subscription option, or another call to action on your webpage. That is why you need to know where that gold-worthy attention goes when a user opens your landing page. Here’s where technology can come in handy.

Eye-Tracking in Web Design

It is very important to know where your website visitor’s attention goes first. How to get that info? Eye-tracking is the answer.

Eye-tracking technology can be used to optimize your website conversions. By tracking eye movements, technology will recognize which content is most intriguing for the users. It will reveal whether people pay most attention where you want them to, which elements are distracting or not visible enough, and where sales are lost. This information is invaluable if you want to succeed in the current market.

This information is invaluable if you want to succeed in the current market

How does it work? An eye tracker, such as webcam or goggles, measures movement of an eye. Collected data is analyzed and presented as a heatmap, highlighting which elements of your design attract most attention. Having in mind that browsing time rarely exceeds a few seconds, this information is very valuable when you try to understand your audience.

You wouldn’t want to spend much time on your website design just to discover it does not generate desired conversion rate. By employing this technology you can make changes based on reliable data rather than intuition and guarantee your business future success.

By now you may think that you definitely need to carry out this eye-tracking study, but there is a catch. A high-quality behavioral observation or eye-tracking is a time-consuming, budget eating complicated process.

If you want to draw conclusions from heatmaps, you would need to include at least 39 participants in a study. One individual test may last from 20 minutes to an hour. Time quickly adds up when you include preparation and analysis of the results. The average eye tracker price is around $17,500 and it may vary between several thousand dollars and $50 000. Of course you can hire a company to carry out this research for you but it may cost you several hundred dollars a month. Luckily, technological innovations allow us to acquire the same insights about users’ attention flow much cheaper and faster than conducting or buying an actual eye-tracking study.

Technological innovations replace real eye-tracking study

AI-Powered Automatization of Eye-Tracking

In this task of understanding how internet users are interacting with your website, Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be an answer. AI-based technologies already have become prevalent in various services we use on a daily basis. For example, Netflix’s highly predictive algorithm offers viewers personalized movie recommendations. Medical researchers utilize eye tracking to diagnose conditions like Alzheimer’s disease or Autism. As these algorithms become better every year, AI also becomes an irreplaceable tool in business.

Over the years researchers have collected so much data that human behavior becomes really predictable

How can AI help you to understand your customer’s attention? The main feature of AI is that it can mimic human intelligence and constantly improve itself by learning from data. Predictive eye-tracking is based on deep learning and trained with previous eye tracking study data. Over the years researchers have collected so much data that human behavior becomes really predictable. Technology predicts which specific areas of your website attract most interest. In this way, AI enables you to speed up the UX research process and get insights about your design in a matter of seconds.

Too good to be true? There are already several available tools on the market, such as Attention Insight or EyeQuant. These predictive design tools are based on deep learning and trained with previous eye-tracking studies data. Up to date, they have achieved an 84-90% accuracy.

AI-powered attention heatmap

AI solutions for designers and marketers have already become major competitors to traditional eye-tracking studies. Due to active competition, predictive eye-tracking tools are constantly innovating and recently started generating heatmaps for videos. Another useful feature that provides decision-makers with quantitative data is a percentage of attention. Users can define an object that they want to test and get an exact percentage of attention that the object receives.

Conclusion

Since all digital products are competing for user’s limited attention, it has become one of the most valuable resources. Due to fierce competition, it is not enough to rely on your intuition and gut instinct while making important decisions anymore. Designers have a choice in this economy of attention, though.

Yes, there are eye-tracking studies that require a significant amount of time and financial resources.

However, you can make user-centric, data-driven decisions in a quick, scalable, and private way while your product is still under development. AI-powered predictive eye-tracking tools might be an answer. Attention is a new currency, and you must measure it.

Source

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Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/our-gatsby-redesign/?utm_source=rss

We knew we had a problem.

In 2019, SitePoint was getting Lighthouse Speed scores under 10 on mobile, and between 20 and 30 on desktop.

Our efforts to control UX bloat were failing in the wake of a publishing business environment that sprang new leaks just as we’d finished temporarily plugging the last one. Our reliance on advertising, controlled by external parties, was a major obstacle to improved site performance. Our traffic growth had turned into decline.

On a site that provided people with a place to come and learn to code with best practices, this was not a good look. And it wasn’t a site we could feel proud of, either.

To make matters worse, operational bottlenecks had arisen that made adaptation a tricky logistical business. Our team was struggling to make changes to the site: having focused on our Premium experience for several years, we were down to one developer with WordPress and PHP experience. To test out code changes, the team would have to wait in a queue to access our staging server.

It wasn’t energizing work for anyone, and it certainly wasn’t efficient.

It was time to make some changes, and we set out to look for a solution. After a lot of research, we decided that Gatsby would be a great fit for our team. It would play to our talent strengths, help us solve all of the issues we had identified, and allow us to keep using WordPress for the backend so the editorial process wouldn’t need to change.

Why We Moved to Gatsby

The end result.

Early in the research process, Gatsby started to look like a serious frontrunner. SitePoint isn’t a small site, so we knew that the tech we chose had to be able to handle some pretty intense demands. Gatsby checked all of our boxes:

We could code everything in React, a tech that every member of the front-end team knows and uses daily.
Gatsby is super fast at its core — performance was at the heart of this project, and we could start from a good footing.
The entire site is rendered as static, which would be great for SEO.
We could build it as a new project, which meant no worrying about the existing codebase, which brought a huge amount of legacy code with it.
We could use Gatsby Cloud, allowing the team to get feedback on the build at any time just by pushing the branch to GitHub.
DDoS attacks on WordPress wouldn’t cause us issues, as the front-end is completely stand-alone.

More Maintainable CSS with styled-components

Since we were going to rebuild the site from scratch, we planned to make some design changes at the same time. To help with this work we decided to use styled-components.

styled-components keeps the site’s styling easy to maintain, and we know where to look when we want to change the style of something — the style is always with the component.

How We Made the Build Happen

We started by following Gatsby’s basic docs and pulling in our posts with the gatsby-source-wordpress plugin.

This was a big initial test for us: we had to see if it was even possible to use Gatsby for our site.

After 20 years of blogging, we have over 17,000 posts published. We knew the builds would take a long time, but we had to find out if Gatsby could deal with such a massive amount of content. As you’ve probably figured, the test delivered good news: Gatsby works.

A quick tip for other teams working with large sites: to make development a better experience, we used environment vars to prevent Gatsby from fetching all of the site’s posts in development. There’s nothing quite like a 60 minute hot reload to slow progress.

if (hasNextPage && process.env.NODE_ENV != “development”) {
return fetchPosts({ first: 100, after: endCursor });
}

From this point, we ran into some limitations with the WordPress source plugin. We couldn’t get all the data we needed, so we moved to the WordPress GraphQL plugin.

We use Yoast to set our metadata for SEO, and had to ensure we were pulling in the correct information. We were able to do this with WordPress GraphQL. By doing it this way, the content team could still edit metadata the same way, and the data would still be dynamic and fetched on each build.

During the build, we would have three or four people in the team working on parts of the new blog. In the past, if they wanted to get feedback they’d have to push to our staging server and make sure nobody was already using it.

We found that Gatsby Cloud was a great solution to this issue. Now when someone pushes to a branch in GitHub, it creates a build in Gatsby Cloud along with a preview link. Our developers could share this link and get immediate testing and feedback much more effectively than before.

This faster feedback cycle made it easy to have multiple people on the team working on the build and put an end to a major bottleneck.

Launch Day Fun

On the big day, we launched the new site and ran through our initial tests. The new blog was flying — every page load felt instant.

We ran into some problems on SitePoint Premium, which started running into slows and even crashes. The culprit was a new element on blog pages that pulled in the popular books people were currently reading. It would do this via a client-side API call, and it was too much for Premium to handle due to the amount of traffic we get on the blog side.

We quickly added some page caching to the API to temporarily solve the issues. We realized we were doing this wrong — we should have been sourcing this data at build time, so that the popular books are already loaded when we serve the page to the user.

This is the main mindset shift you need to make when using Gatsby: any data that you can get at build time should be fetched at build time. You should only use client-side API calls when you need live data.

Once we’d re-written the API call to happen during the build, the first load of a blog page was even quicker — and Premium stopped crashing.

What We Still Need to Solve

While it’s hard to overstate how much better our on-site experience is today, there are still a few pain points we need to solve.

If a new article is published, or if content is updated — as it is multiple times per day — we need to re-run the Gatsby build before these changes show up.

Our solution for that right now is a simple cron job that runs at pre-scheduled times over the course of a day. The long-term solution to this is to add a webhook to the WordPress publish and update button, so that a new build is triggered once pressed.

We also need to get incremental builds running. Right now, the entire site needs to be rebuilt each time, and given our content archive, this can take a while. Gatsby just introduced incremental builds as we went live, and we’re working on implementing this on our site. Once that’s set up our builds will be much faster if the only thing that has changed is content.

Our speed score is still not where we want it to be. While the site feels subjectively very fast, we are still not getting consistent scores in Lighthouse. We want to get both mobile and desktop into the green zone (scores of 90+) for optimal user experience and SEO.

Would We Do It Again?

A launch of this type would normally be a pretty nerve-wracking event, and take a lot of work from the team on launch day.

With Gatsby, our launch was really easy. We just had to move WordPress onto a new domain, and point sitepoint.com at the Gatsby version of the site.

Then we sat back and watched the numbers to see what happened to our traffic. Within a few days, the data was starting to come in and we were seeing a 15% increase in traffic. User engagement metrics were up across the board. And we hadn’t even removed our ads yet (which, you may have noticed, we’ve since done).

It’s not hard to figure out why the effects were so immediate. We had better SEO running on static HTML and CSS pages, and massive speed improvements made possibly by the move to Gatsby.

Since we made the move, we’ve increased our Lighthouse speed scores from 6-15 on mobile to the 50-60 range, and from the 30s on desktop into the 70s. We wanted to ensure speed remained top of mind with this change, so we’re using a great tool called Calibre that runs speed tests over a number of top pages each day and alerts us to the scores. We are using this tool to continue to improve our score, so I hope to have another article for you in three months when we get everything to stay in the 90+ range.

The team loves working in Gatsby. The blog codebase was something that nobody wanted to work on. Now, everyone wants to take those cards thanks to the great developer experience.

If you’ve been eyeing a move to Gatsby and wondering if it’s ready for prime time, take our advice — it’s worth the switch.

Continue reading
Why We Moved a 20-Year-Old Site to Gatsby
on SitePoint.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/IhPdK7g8Iq4/fork-surreal-journey-interrogating-our-perception

FORK – Surreal Journey Interrogating our Perception

abduzeedo07.07.20

In a museum, a woman looking at a Fork exhibited as a piece of Art let her imagination run wild. The film is a surreal journey interrogating our perception of objects. What happens when you take an object from daily life and move it outside of its original context? What is left of an object when it loses its function? An abstract shape, a sculpture? Can we deconstruct this object into simple elements and create variation of this object? Can those objects be combined to form a larger structure? Can those objects become alive to break free from human ownership? That’s the synopsis of FORK, a really cool film and motion design project created by the amazing people over at Optical Arts a creative studio based in London. With an experimental approach and a collective spirit we explore new ways to tell visual stories, applying innovative techniques to live action, digital and print.

Director Fabrice Le Nezet:

We choose to work with simple objects, some iconic items everyone could easily recognize. A fork, a stool, a Mug. Because we wanted to play with sculptural forms, we chose objects that are beautiful and elegant with clear volume and silhouette.

Behind the Scenes:

Most of this project was completed in lockdown due to Covid-19 pandemic. This presented its own unique challenges, working remotely for the CGI elements was fairly straightforward, but we had to delay the live action element of the shoot until Government restrictions eased. We kept the crew to a minimum and implemented a strict social distancing of two meters and masks and gloves were worn by all. Planning an extra prellight day to the schedule allowed us to set up the different shots with only essential lighting and camera crew, creating a much less demanding, more efficient and most importantly safe shoot day.

Technical Considerations:

The film has been made using a combination of Maya and Houdini and was rendered in Redshift. All shots were then composed in Nuke and Flame and graded using Resolve.

The procedural approach of Houdini made it the perfect tool to create this project. 

While developing some R&D we were able to quickly sketch ideas and seamlessly test dynamic behaviour. Animation was achieved through a mixture of physic based simulation alongside some more manual bespoke procedural setup.

Credits

Creative Direction & Production: Optical Arts
Direction & Design: Fabrice Le Nezet
Music & Sound Design: Niccolò Chotkowski at Smider
VFX Supervisor: Fabrice Le Nezet
2D Supervisor: Miguel Wratten
3D Artist: Max Johnson
Colourist: Martin Pryor
Live Action Producer: Caroline Kinch
Live Action DP: Joe Jackson
1st Assistant Camera: Elliott Lowe
Set Assistant: Jamie-Lee Harding
Model: Emma Norodom at W Models
Clothing: Studio Nicholson

For more information and to read the full making of I highly recommend that you check out https://opticalarts.studio/fork/