August 30, 1999

By BOB TEDESCHI

Good Web Site Design Can Lead to Healthy Sales

s IBM positioned itself as an Internet leader last year, with a marketing campaign that helped e-commerce gain mainstream currency, a somewhat troubling reality emerged.

The company wasn't minding its own e-business.

	Susan Greenwood for The New York Times
	Carol Moore, IBM's vice president for Internet operations, said the company's redesign team reviewed more than one million Web pages.

On IBM's Web site, the most popular feature was the search function, "because people couldn't figure out how to navigate the site," said Carol Moore, IBM's vice president for Internet operations. The second most popular feature was the "help" button, because the search technology was so ineffective.

IBM's solution was a 10-week effort to redesign the site, which involved more than 100 employees at a cost Ms. Moore estimated "in the millions." As the redesign neared completion in February, IBM consciously held off on promoting the Web site, so it could gauge the effectiveness of the new design. The result: In the first week after the redesign, use of the "help" button decreased 84 percent, while sales increased 400 percent.

Internet users have for years complained about how difficult it is to use most Web sites, frustrated by things like shoddy search engines, Byzantine navigation schemes and long waits for pages to download. But with e-commerce sites proliferating on the Web, those shortcomings are increasingly recognized as grave threats to the bottom line. And as more sites seek profitability by expanding their product offerings -- and customers struggle to click their way through complex product listings -- Web site design is looming as an ever-more crucial facet of the business.

"The customer's experience on the Web can make or break a business," said Mark Hurst, president of Creative Good, a consulting firm that helps clients address what is known as Web site usability. "There was $3 billion lost on the Web last year because of poor design -- sites not realizing that if they just make it easier for the consumer to buy, they'll make more sales."

Ms. Moore said IBM's redesign focused not just on the "Shop IBM." section of the site, but on each of the more than one million pages on that site. The project involved several components, including information architecture -- or the arrangement of information within a site -- navigation, graphic design and the selection of words and photographs for each page.

The first order of business, Ms. Moore said, was to create some cohesion at the site, which had previously been split into three segments: a software section, a PC section and a catalog site for products like cables, printers and disk drives. Each section had been designed by a separate team, she said, in conjunction with 60 so-called interactive agencies, which help companies develop their Web sites.

The fragmentation was apparent: Information was arranged differently from section to section, search results were inconsistent and pages loaded at different speeds. "It may sound obvious," Ms. Moore said, "but things have to work the same everywhere on the site for people to feel comfortable."

The company assembled a team made up of people from several departments, including programming, information technology and marketing. The team then developed a plan to change the site's navigation and improve its search technology. It also created templates for each page, so the interactive agencies IBM works with -- which the company winnowed to four from 60 -- could conform to a single design standard. The templates helped decrease the time it takes to load a page by 30 percent, Ms. Moore said, noting that the average time spent per visit has fallen 28 percent since the redesign, "so we know people are getting what they want more quickly."

Hurst of Creative Good said e-commerce sites with enormous inventories were particularly at risk for design flaws. "If Amazon adds 30 more shopping categories, and just puts 30 more tabs on their home page, that would be a problem," he said. "There could be a way to design it so it's not too hard to find what you want, but whatever way you go you're adding more work for the user."

In the future, he said, "we may see that the customer experience is better and faster on more focused sites, and the superstores that get too big either die out or come back to a better focus.

"If another store had the same books and service as Amazon and you could get to the books right away, why wouldn't you go to that store?" he added.

One site that has had to figure out how to manage an enormous inventory is Travelocity, a travel site owned by the Sabre Group. The site offers 95 percent of the available airline seats in the world on any given day, the company said, along with listings from 40,000 hotels, 50 car rental companies and numerous cruise lines and tour companies.

Terrell Jones, Travelocity's president, said that when the company began its online operations 13 years ago on Compuserve, Prodigy and America Online, its system "was easy, but not simple."

"We'd step you through everything, which was very supportive, but it took a long time and lots of screens," he said.

Last year, the company put a simplified ticket-buying system on the site's front page, allowing users to immediately type in their destination and the times they want to travel; the system then returns nine different flight results. Notably, Jones said, the company tested the feature with focus groups, "with the marketing and programming people behind the one-way mirror."

"For it to work, the programmers need to hear people call their baby ugly," he said.

Jones said Travelocity also changed certain features based on e-mail complaints from customers. The company values such comments, he said, because many people don't bother to write. "We were lucky because on the Web site, if people don't understand it, they just leave," he said. "It's not like a corporation where people will call to tell you what's wrong. So usability is exceptionally important, because you don't have face-to-face contact with the customer."

Jakob Nielsen, a usability consultant who publishes a column on the topic at http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/cyber/commerce/#1, said e-commerce sites were "actually getting much better than traditional sites, because there's such a direct bottom-line impact" from design.

The legacy of first-generation non-e-commerce sites is, in fact, partly to blame for the current state of e-commerce site design, he said. "A lot of sites started simply as informational sites, and they've grafted e-commerce onto themselves, so they have split personalities," Nielsen said.

Companies are loath to part with Web pages they spent millions of dollars to develop, he said, even if the pages do not add to the site's functionality. "It's a good excuse," he said, "but the user doesn't care about all that history."

The E-COMMERCE REPORT is published weekly, on Mondays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.

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Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

• IBM

• Creative Good

• Travelocity

• Useit.com

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Bob Tedeschi at tedeschi@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.

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