A More Accessible High Street

Wed, 21 October, 2009

At Creative Happy we take accessibility very serious because if your site isn't user-friendly or accessible, future and current customers or users will struggle and generally wont visit your site again. So it was nice to read that the online high streets stores where taking this on board. M&S came out top this year from a report done by Webcredible.

The Online High Street Report, from web usability consultancy Webcredible, finds the newly-launched M&S site much improved - last year it ranked ninth.

John Lewis maintained its third position while fourth and most improved was Boots.

The now online-only Woolworths brand improved its usability score from 65% to 80%.

"No less than five have scored 80% or more for website usability, which is unprecedented," said Trenton Moss, director of Webcredible.

"This is no doubt, largely down to online shopping revenues continuing to increase despite the recession, that the user experience of retailers' websites is a key point of differentiation in such a competitive market place," he added.

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

- BBC News

Despite the online high streets stores doing really well this year, there are still basic area's where the stores need to improve on such as: same form for logging on a registering, allowing customers to alter the number of projects displayed and changing of link colours on visited pages as reported in this post from the BBC News Website.