Good Website Gone Bad

E-commerce UX review

What’s this about:

I love shopping for clothes online. I’ve put a lot of leisure time into it as a user, and a lot of research time into it as a UX professional. And some e-commerce websites just do it right, you know? When every little detail is thought of, you don’t feel any bumps along the way. When the entire process is finished and smooth on every step. You probably have a favorite e-commerce site that has never given you heartburn (let that sink in from a user perspective — how exactly did they hook you?)

I am a huge fan of how ASOS does everything. It’s fast, it’s clean, it’s intuitive, their customer service is great, and it’s constantly improving.

I recently had a poor, albeit entertaining e-commerce checkout experience and wanted to draw attention to some things that are not necessarily design-related but are very much UX-related. You’ll see what I mean.

What happened

I was looking for a dress and found it on the Saks Fifth Avenue website.

I will skip the process of finding the dress because it was pretty straightforward — the Saks Fifth Avenue website design is clean, colorful, and on brand. There are areas for improvement, but overall I had no problem finding what I was looking for. The filtering options are plenty, which is always nice on fashion websites where there are thousands of results. This reduces the possibility of being overwhelmed — you have more control over what you see.

❤️ I found a dress and immediately decided to buy it. That part is very relevant because if I hadn’t liked the dress so much, I would have abandoned the process one-third of the way in. I decided to create an account, because of a 10% off deal if you sign up, and I love a bargain. Then I fell into a loop that looked like this:

1. I filled the Sign-Up form, clicked on the “Sign up” CTA, and got an error message that “Something went wrong while creating my account”;
2. I tried to sign up again, and got this:

OK, so there was an error but my account has been created. Let’s try to Sign in.

So I have an account but I cannot access it 🤦‍♀️

I did this twice, with two different emails. That’s how much I liked the dress (again, very important). It was also at this time that I started taking screenshots because this was shaping up to be painful.

When it didn’t work the second time, I decided to contact customer support:

Dube was actually super helpful in the end — I got my 10% discount, which was the reason for all this hassle. Thank you Dube, who I briefly wondered whether you were human.

So Dube doesn’t know what’s going on, but I got the discount without my account 💪🏻 .

Now I just had to go through checkout. Because I was unable to access my account, I had to check out as a guest. Then this happened:

After I tried all the phone formats I could think of and took 10 screenshots for this post, I contacted customer support again.

Deja on the ball, right from the start.

Switching to Safari made all the difference. I was able to wrap up my shopping, easy peasy. I also discovered that if I had just used the Paypal button which I missed, none of this would have happened. But it should not have happened either way. Instantly knowing that it is a browser issue also indicates that they’ve had these problems before.

It is very important to optimize your User Experience for all browsers. I shouldn’t be made to feel guilty because I hadn’t thought of switching the browser myself. I expect to be able to finish my shopping regardless of the browser I use. I am a spoiled shopper who will leave if I have to spend a half an hour on checkout.

👉 Over 50% of the US Browser Market Share is covered by the Google Chrome browser — that’s the green line. This experience needs to be seamless.

Why all this is relevant

1. I finished my shopping, despite the very long experience that I should have wrapped up in 5 minutes. As I said, I really liked the dress — in my mind I would have finished the process no matter what. This says a lot about how much bad UX people are willing to tolerate when the incentive is strong enough, or when the content is attractive enough. We are also willing to tolerate more mistakes when the overall experience is pretty. This is true for almost anything in life — so why not here? However, this does not mean we should abuse this privilege.
2. I mentioned earlier that these errors are not necessarily design-related but are very much UX-related. The UI works well, and the basic UX best practices are in place. The designer probably drew it all up nicely and delivered their design file to development. But even if these errors are not necessarily a visual design issue, they are very much a part of the User Experience and that’s what suffers in the end. This is why I would encourage all designers to dig into the final product and test, test, test. We are in charge of the whole thing - so take charge and think beyond.

These things happen, obviously. Bugs are everywhere, it’s not the end of the world, it does not mean they haven’t fixed it since, it just means I ran out of emails to try it all again.

So I did a bit more digging: Saks Fifth Avenue has a rating of 1.3 on Trustpilot. Also, the reviews have been getting steadily worse since at least 2017. Most people complain about customer service, shipping, and the overall company policies regarding discounts and gift cards.

I guess I got lucky.

The results from MonkeyLearn sentiment analysis show a negative sentiment in the reviews, with a confidence of 99.4% — I’ve never seen such negativity in reviews. And check out the word cloud composed from the Trustpilot reviews content:

The irony is, I had a completely different experience: the customer service was fine, and the package was delivered on time in pretty paper and a pretty box. I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a poor service design. What happened to me isn’t even close to the top of their priorities. To add insult to injury, Saks is known for their excellent in-person customer service — so where did they go wrong online? Someone needs to ask a lot of questions.

This is a perfect opportunity for the stakeholders to find out what they’re doing wrong. People are giving them free feedback, the data is out there for them to use and make the necessary adjustments. A good call right about now would be to collect all the data they can and hire someone with expertise in service design to help them out.

A lot more research needs to be done here, but there are some very exciting chances for improvement — it would be a shame not to take them.

👋 You’ve probably had a similar experience — tell us about it.