The Shopping Cart Experience

The Shopping Cart metaphor is one of the most common features found on e-commerce enabled web sites. A poorly designed or difficult to use shopping cart can be a major obstacle for consumers attempting to make a purchase. This story explores some of the challenges encountered in trying to improve a shopping cart system (Note: The products and prototypes shown in this feature are meant for illustrative purposes only. These images are not intended to represent real products or businesses).

In my ongoing attempt to improve e-commerce usability, I was faced with a number of different discrete areas that needed to be researched. The company I was working for was a provider of complete e-commerce solutions. This meant that they had developed proprietary back-end software that could be used by a number of different storefronts, thus leveraging their investment in technology across numerous clients. The shopping cart system was one of these components, shared by all clients.

The original shopping cart system was designed exclusively by software engineers with no input from the design or user experience groups. The cart was designed as a pop-up window activated when a user clicked to have a product added to his or her cart.

Originally, this idea seemed logical for a number of reasons. The most salient argument was that a pop-up window would allow the shopper to remain in the shopping process by leaving them on the current product page. The rationale was that going to a separate cart page would be disruptive. However, there was no empirical data to back up this claim (for more information on how this unfounded idea became the source of resistance to change, see the Unexpected Obstacles to Usability Case Study).

Figure 1- Pop-up Window Shopping Cart System
Click for Larger Image Launched in New Window

These changes (and others) occurred over a number of months as we continued to be frustrated with the usability of the shopping cart system. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that the pop-up version of the cart had reached its limits for meaningful improvement. At that point, we began to research a full page version of the cart.