Mastering User Experience with Jason Broughton from Zappos

New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

User experience. This phrase has been tossed around a lot in the last few years, but few have actually mastered applying it in all aspects of their business. Most businesses focus on the wire-framing and usability testing, but there are some even easier ways to reel in customers and keep them coming back. Jason Broughton, head of UX for Zappos, weighs in on how to make your website useful, usable, and an experience that will ensure customers will keep coming back for more. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Jason Broughton of Zappos.com) Andrew: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast, the show dedicated to helping high six and seven-figure entrepreneurs build amazing online companies and incredible lives. I'm your host and fellow eCommerce entrepreneur, Andrew Youderian. Hey, you guys, it's Andrew here, and welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today. Today on the show, talking about UX, otherwise known as user experience, and joined by Jason Broughton, who's the head of UX at Zappos. Zappos, of course, is the very well-known shoe and apparel retailer. Jason's got an incredible depth of experience doing this both at Zappos and a number of other companies. And we dive into what UX is. UX is one of those issues that is a little bit ambiguous, sometimes. What it is, the process at Zappos for improving UX, how data-driven they are, some of his favorite tools. We talk about the future of site usability and what's coming down the pipe in terms of changes, things that are coming down the road, a lot of different ground. So I came away with a pretty substantial to-do list for my own site, and I hope it's something that you find applicable as well. We'll go ahead and dive right in. Jason, UX is a term that gets thrown around a lot online, and I think people are very familiar with what paid advertising is, what web design is, what programming is. But UX is a little fuzzier for a lot of people in terms of what it actually means. Can you give us a sense of what it means to you and what it encompasses? What Exactly Is UX? Jason: Yeah, it's a good question. To me, UX is a lot of the things that you just mentioned, plus it has a lot to do with the usability of your site, the accessibility of the site, and the overall pleasure a customer has interacting with your site. It needs to be both useful, usable, and delightful, and not necessarily in that order, but we try to encapsulate all three of those. If your site isn't useful, no one is going to come to it. If it's not usable, people have a hard time interacting with it. And lastly, if it's not delightful, the loyalty of your product is not going to be what it could be. Andrew: That puts a lot of weight on your shoulders, it sounds like. Jason: It can. Yeah, it does. But we have a great team. And it is a lot of stress at some times. The Most Important Thing to the Zappos Customer Andrew: What is most important to the Zappos customer in terms of user experience? Obviously, Zappos is a brand, is immensely focused on customer service, that's what you guys have built your brand on. But how does that translate into the actual user experience of the web experience, of the website? Jason: Yeah. I think that customer experiences encapsulates all of your customers' touch-points, whether it's over the phone or on the website, or when they un-box to package. User experience is more about the interaction touch-point on the website. So it's when someone's interacting with the website, specifically. And so a lot of the things that we have to worry about, and our users care a lot about, is accurate information from pricing, to being sure that there's trust when they're going through the checkout process, so the usefulness, the usability is quick. And then also,