User eXperience (UX) Archives User eXperience (UX)

User eXperience (UX)

Feb 29 2024

Is conversational commerce really the future?

“Always be available”. That’s common advice for online businesses. After all, you don’t know who might be awake and browsing your site. Having a website makes this easy, and using automated bots for your customer service makes it even easier. That’s why conversational commerce has grown so popular. But is this a good development? Or better yet: is it even required?

What is conversational commerce?

Before we dive deeper into the topic, let’s cover the basics. Conversational commerce is when your customers can contact you through a messenger channel of their choice, and finish their purchase within the same channel.

In other words: if you start a conversation with a business via Facebook Messenger, then purchase the product via the chat, you’ve engaged in conversational commerce.

That sounds useful!

It is. You’ll have 24/7 customer support. Not to mention, customers will get an answer within seconds. That’s important, because 73% of people consider good customer experience an important part of their buying decision. And 65% of customers say a positive experience is more influential than advertising.

So, it’s clear that customer service is an important part of the customer journey. Then why are you leaving it up to bots? Because of the 24/7 availability? That’s valid. But if you’re doing it because it’s cheap and easy, you might need to reconsider. Think about it: if all your competitors are doing the same thing, then your human-driven customer service will stand out in the bot crowd.

Remember work-life balance?

As we said before, the current expectation is that businesses always need to be available. There’s no denying that. However, we can question if that’s a healthy mindset. And before you scoff and say that ‘lazy gen-zers just don’t want to work’, studies have shown that work has actually become more intense over the years. Which has a huge negative impact on our mental health.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why 52% of American millennials (and 48% of German millennials) would rather earn 20% less money than have a shitty work-life balance. So, it’s clear that people nowadays don’t want to work, work, work. So why is this expected of businesses?

How can small businesses keep up?

This 24/7 expectation isn’t just bad for our mental health. It also makes it tough for small businesses to keep up. Think about an illustrator selling their own art, or two friends selling handmade clothes. They probably can’t afford the shiny CRM tools or AI chatbots. And with 24/7 customer service being so important, these small businesses should be dying out.

#support small businesses

But they’re not. In fact, while 20% of businesses fail in the first year, that means a whopping 80% survives. Which makes sense when you consider that 91% of consumers prefer to support small businesses when convenient, and 74% will even actively seek them out!

Interestingly enough, 71% of consumers also expect better support from small businesses. So, why do they have this expectation? It might be because small businesses have humans doing their customer service, since they (usually) don’t have enough money for conversational commerce tools. Which begs the question: Do people prefer talking to other people?

Humans prefer humans

The answer is yes. People seem to generally prefer talking to other humans. But why? A study found that users believe that “chatbots are incapable of providing high-quality communication”, which can lead to people no longer being as loyal to platforms after chatting with a chatbot. In some cases, it even led to a staggering 79.7% reduction of sales.

Is conversational commerce useless then?

It’s not. You can still set up live chats with real people, or allow people to send a message via WhatsApp. Depending on your business’s budget, you’ll be able to provide 24/7 service. But judging by people’s unwavering support for small businesses, it doesn’t seem to matter as much if you can’t.

Disclaimer: of course, it’s still important for small businesses to reply quickly to their consumers. While consumers might not expect an immediate response, they also don’t want to wait for weeks.

Best of both worlds

However, we can’t ignore the current situation. If lots of businesses offer 24/7 service, you’ll feel pressure to do the same. Besides, it would be silly to completely ignore all the amazing technology that’s available. You don’t want to make your life harder than it needs to be. So, what should you do?

Well, why not use both? Implement technology strategically. For example, by using AI in the background to help your customer service employees quickly find information. You’ll honor people’s preference for human interaction, while also empowering your employees with AI tools. You’ll have the best of both worlds.

Keep reading: The future of blogging in a video-obsessed world »

Cindy Paul

Cindy is a content manager at Yoast. She writes and optimizes blog posts, and enjoys writing content that will help people create better content for their site and users.

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Jan 30 2024

The importance of accessibility in WordPress

WordPress and the community around it are very committed to making websites as accessible as possible. Websites should be accessible to every visitor and anyone should be able to use WordPress to create their website or application. To keep accessibility top of mind, there’s a dedicated Accessibility Team that provides expertise and further improves WordPress in this regard. Let’s dive into what accessibility means in the world of WordPress and what you can do to contribute to a more accessible web.

One of the cool things about WordPress is that it’s an open source project. One that invites people from all over the world to work on it. Behind it is a very diverse community of people that works towards creating a platform that anyone can use. So naturally, accessibility is a big theme in WordPress.

Accessibility Coding Standards

So how can you keep an eye on the accessibility of WordPress with so many different people contributing to the platform? This is where the Accessibility Coding Standards come in. Since 2016, these have been added to the Core Handbook as a part of the code standards for WordPress developers. This resource helps contributors make sure their code conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, at level AA. This means WordPress will be making the product more accessible with every new update.

A short explanation of WCAG 2.1, level AA

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 cover a wide range of recommendations to make online content more accessible. Accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these. And some accommodations for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations.

The Level AA is used as a reference for a legal standard in many countries worldwide. Level AA success criteria address concerns that are more complicated to address and impact smaller groups of people, but are still common needs with broad reach.

The next step: ATAG compliance

Right now, any new WordPress code needs to meet the WCAG 2.1, level AA. An additional goal that the community is working towards is ATAG compliance. ATAG stands for Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, guidelines on how to create a tool for creating web pages that are both accessible and encourage the creation of accessible content. At the moment, WordPress is not ATAG compliant yet. However, the community has pledged to pursue features that are in line with achieving this goal.

Check the accessibility of your site

If you think your audience doesn’t profit from accessibility, think again. Not only does an accessible website grow your audience, but following these guidelines often makes your website more usable for all users. Talk to your developers. Check the accessibility of your site. If you’re using an old version of WordPress update to a newer version to benefit from the latest developments in accessibility.

Free accessibility tools for your site

Running your code through the W3C Validator every once in a while helps you determine if you’re using clean code. Usually, the recommendations this validator gives you, are easy to fix. And they might already make a huge difference in terms of accessibility.

Another great and very easy-to-use tool is WAVE. Just install the browser extension and see for yourself:

The WAVE extension analyses a variety of possible accessibility issues. In the screenshot above, you can see things like missing form labels and contrast issues. This WAVE analysis is done in seconds, it shows you where the problems are on your page and it tells you where your website can be improved for accessibility.

Contrast is also really easy to test and improve. Simply use the contrast tool in WAVE or go to the WebAIM contrast checker. If you’re interested in more tools that can help you, read our post on how to improve the accessibility of your website.

Progress, not perfection

After running your website through the accessibility checker or reading through all the guidelines, you might wonder whether it’s even worth the effort. But remember, every change to your website makes it a bit more accessible. Makes your potential audience bigger and your user experience better. It’s about taking accessibility seriously and handling the main issues first. Nobody’s perfect, but it is important to keep an open mind and be willing to improve your website.

Camille Cunningham

Camille is a content specialist at Yoast. As part of the Search team, she enjoys creating content that helps you master SEO.

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Dec 16 2022

Ecommerce Is Going Back In Time & Here’s Why

Ecommerce is always changing but here is one big reason I see as to why.

How can you win in an extremely crowded space like LA traffic at 5 p.m. On a weekday.

I started building my first website using HTML in the late 90s. but let’s be honest no one wants to hear about me and building some websites. But the reason I brought it up is things were much simpler. We didn’t have the ability to create a lot of functions or fancy movement on websites back then.

You might ask what this has to do with digital commerce today, well I can tell you. Back then we had one thing and that was extremely slow internet. So, to get a web page to load sometimes felt like ages. Large images were not an option complex design was also not an option.

Now this affects the user experience dramatically. Our goal back then from the .com boom on was to make sites simple and could load quickly with a slow internet connection DSL.

Now as Internet speeds increased our desire for cooler looking websites that had cooler functions or in our minds seems cooler took over. I mean there was some wild stuff that was happening in the mid-2000s.

One thing was for certain we still had a slow internet connection compared to nowadays. So the goal back then in e-commerce was to make sure your website loaded quickly and the only way to do that was to make sure that it didn’t have too much complexity.

Back then we were fighting a slow internet connection or slow server speeds.

In 2007, the U.S. download speed average was 3.5 mbps

In 2022 U.S. internet download speed averages is 109 Mbps

Back then we were fighting a slow internet connection or slow server speeds. Today we are fighting a fast internet connection with extremely fast server speeds, but we are battling extremely short users’ attention spans.

BUT ITS REALLY THE SAME FIGHT!

So, in order to capture users’ imagination, we have to do it within a matter of seconds. So keep these facts in mind when you’re building your website today or you’re looking to optimize your performance today.

THE BIG TAKE AWAY IS LESS IS MORE!

JUST LOOK AT TARGET.COM HOME PAGE IN 2007 COMPARED TO TODAY. THE BIG CHANGE I SEE IS A WHOLE LOT LESS OF EVERYTHING!

BACK IN 2007

TODAY

By Jeffry Graham

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