One of the keys to a successful website is “usability”. Now a new report of UK high street brands has revealed that the Marks and Spencer and WH Smith sites are the most user-friendly.

The revamped M&S website has jumped from ninth place last year in the annual Online High Street Report. In third place in 2009 is John Lewis, while Boots the Chemist took fourth position.

For the first time, five of the high street brands scored more than 80% in the usability score, including the now on-line only Woolworths, which took fifth place in the survey.

Trenton Moss, director of Webcredible, the web usability consultancy behind the survey, is reported as saying that these days, especially during a recession, the user-friendliness of a retailer’s website could be the “key point of differentiation in a competitive market place”.

The criteria used to evaluate the websites included browsing, navigation, the checkout process, searching and product display pages.

The survey did, however, find a number of areas for improvement, such as allowing customers to alter the number of products displayed on a page and changing the colour of visited links.

Take note all your e-commerce owners.

Tags: Ecommerce, usability

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Business, Ecommerce, Site Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Posted by Leon You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.