Nielsen: E-commerce usability improving - slowly

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox column reveals that adherence to his own e-commerce usability guidelines -- as measured by assessment of a selection of large e-biz sites -- increased 4 percent, to an average of 49 percent, in the last year and a half.

So the good news is, it's getting better. The bad news is, at this rate, full compliance with at least Nielsen's list of usability guidelines is still 15 years away.

Now, please understand that "full compliance," in Nielsen's definition, means adherence to at least 90 percent of his 207 guidelines (if you want to see them all, you can buy his report here).

Some are no-brainers, such as correct use of a simple search box; non-compliance there comes with no excuse. Others are tougher to engineer, such as the spectrum of international language and purchasing support tactics.

Depending upon the objectives of a Web site or application, full compliance may be either undesirable or unfeasible. Even assuming you agree with all 207 Nielsen guidelines, I like to think of them as a universe of possible strategies toward an e-business's customer experience goals.

Pick the ones that get you closest to the prize most efficiently; eliminate those that are irrelevant or yield insufficient returns on the investment for your business (compliance with multilingual guidelines, for example, is meaningful only if you intend to do business with multilingual customers). Then shoot for 100 percent compliance with those most important guidelines.