What are some of the great user experience “success stories”?


I don't know if this is the type of UX success story you're looking for, but there was a highly publicized case study of "The $300 Million Button" at Amazon.com (it's also included in Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks).

Basically, there was an unknown conversion bottleneck in the Amazon shopping process:
  1. User picks out the stuff they want to buy and adds them to their shopping cart
  2. User clicks "checkout" to presumably pay for the purchases
  3. A form pops up, as it does on many e-commerce sites, that asks the user to Log In or Register.
This simple form caused $300M worth of shopping cart abandonment as many users resented having to register to make a purchase (Amazon originally predicted they would be happy about saving time on future visits with Amazon's patented "one-click-checkout"), and others couldn't remember if this was their first visit to Amazon and became frustrated with each failed login/password attempt. The point: no one wanted to click "Register".

This, despite the fact that the registration form didn't ask for any additional information that wouldn't already be needed to checkout with. Additionally, even users who had registered in the past stumbled on the form when they forgot their email address or password.

The fix they came up with was to replace the "Register" button with "Continue" and a message that read:

"You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site.  Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future  purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout."

This little change resulted in a 45% increase in completed purchases, and for the first year, the site saw an additional $300M in revenue.

This is one of those classic marketing parables that reminds you to test everything and test often. Don't just go with "common sense" or your gut feeling. You might not think that having the shopping cart on the right or left would make a big difference, but it can and does. And it can even have different results on different sites.

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