Another crazy week, and not so much good usability articles appeared on my radar. Yet, there’s a few, and here they are.

• Is Customer Experience Recession-Proof? (03/14/2008)
• eCommerce Usability Review: Advanced Search Pages (03/13/2008)
• 11 Ways to Fill Your Shopper’s Cart (03/12/2008)
• Google to start to implement site performance metrics in SEM Quality Score (03/07/2008)

Is Customer Experience Recession-Proof?

Apparently, when consumer spending drops, the fight over the remaining dollars intensifies. A new report from Forrester goes in that direction. According to the summary, “more than 80% of respondents said that improving the usability, usefulness and enjoyability of the online experience is more important this year.” Respondents forecast increased spending in Web Analytics (68%), Usability (53%) and Behavioral Research (51%).

Via: Research Central @ CIO Insight

eCommerce Usability Review: Advanced Search Pages

Yesterday, Varien published an advanced search page attributes review, that is somewhat a sequel to usability review on search page attributes. Same concept as before, the folks take a couple of very good, good and bad pages to display what advanced search engine pages out there allow the user to do. I’m particularilly a fan of the “refine search” concept,
as it is in harmony with the progressive disclosure principle.

Via: Varien’s eCommerce Cache Blog

See also: Usability of gift registries, also at Varien

11 Ways to Fill Your Shopper’s Cart

I liked this one as it helped complete my eCommerce site functionality checklist. Most of Stoney deGeyter’s tips are obvious if you already designed a few eCommerce sites (search engine, product comparison guides, product reviews, etc.), but the list is brief and well assembled, which makes it a good reference tool to save you some thinking time.

Via: Search Engine Guide

Google to start to implement site performance metrics in SEM Quality Score

Earlier this week, Google released a post indicating that they will start to consider the landing page load time in the calculation of the Quality Score. The guys at Traffick see it as the beginning of a trend, and I tend to agree after reading Yahoo’s usability patent filling last week.

Via: Traffick

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