useit.com Alertbox July 2001 Location Finders

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Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, July 8, 2001:

Helping Users Find Physical Locations

Summary:
When we asked users to find a nearby store, office, dealership, or other outlet based on information provided at a parent company's website, users succeeded only 63% of the time. On average, the 10 sites we studied complied with less than half of our 21 usability guidelines for locator design.

The Internet may be virtual, but customers live in physical space and often need to visit companies in the real world. Given this, geography determines business success in a very simple way: Customers can either identify and find your location or they cannot.

Websites play a major role in helping customers find their way to company locations, including branches, stores, offices, dealers, and other outlets such as ATMs, package drop-off points, or facilities that accept return goods for e-commerce sites. Whenever customers need to transact business at a physical location, a company's website should help them find the most convenient location that offers the services they need.

To assess the usability of location finders on the Web, we conducted usability studies of website locators for 10 major companies: Andersen, the American Automobile Association (AAA), Bank of America, BMW, Caterpillar, Charles Schwab & Co., The Dow Chemical Company, Toys R Us, Verizon, and Wells Fargo. The number of locations represented by each website ranged from a few hundred to several thousand.

The bottom line: On average across the 10 sites, users successfully found appropriate locations 63% of the time.

An average success rate of 63% is fairly high relative to many of our other Web design usability studies. For example, we measured a 56% success rate in a recent study of people shopping on e-commerce websites and a 60% success rate in our study of professional journalists trying to find PR information. In studies of more complex Web applications or big intranets, we usually find success rates well below 50%.

So, one way of looking at the current findings is that a 63% success rate is one of the highest we have measured in our Web usability studies. On the other hand, a success rate of 63% implies a failure rate of 37%. That's a lot of customers to lose because they can't find your store, office, or dealership.

One Strike, and You're Out

Getting location information can be particularly difficult on sites that sell online, because online stores tend to appropriate the natural vocabulary used to describe physical stores. In clicks-and-mortar designs, it's often difficult to locate the mortar.

In our study, Toys R Us failed miserably because www.toysrus.com has been co-branded with www.amazon.com. Even though Amazon is usually a great site, the Toys R Us area was so oriented toward e-commerce that the vast majority of our users never found the link to the physical stores. The link was buried on the fifth screen from the top (on a standard home-user screen of 800x600 pixels) and vaguely labeled "Learn more about Toys R Us, Inc.," instead of something more descriptive like "Locate the Toys R Us store nearest you."

Best Locator: Charles Schwab

• It was easy to get to the locator from the homepage: Users simply followed the "Visit a branch" link.
• The locator tool functioned like a simple search and was easy to use. Also, entering a street address was optional, thus addressing users' privacy concerns.
• The site made good use of overview maps, while also providing detailed maps and directions.

Schwab scored a 100% success rate in our user testing. However, this does not mean the site is perfect. It does violate a few usability guidelines, though the violations did not prevent test users from completing their test tasks. For example, Schwab's location finder works only for American branches, and does not have a link for finding branches overseas. Because we only tested Americans users in this particular study, this usability issue was not a problem. Overseas customers would not be so lucky: To find European offices, you have to go Schwab's Europe page and find the less-than-obvious "Service Channels" link.

Read More: 21 Design Guidelines

A regression analysis of guidelines compliance versus users' ability to find locations leads to the estimate that each time a site complies with one more guideline, user success will increase by 7% on average. When you consider the financial gain associated with getting 7% more customers into your stores, it's easy to justify the small cost of improving locators to meet usability guidelines.