Building Customer-Centric Online Stores

First Class Delivery from the Multi-channel Experts

Competition for online customers is fierce. Internet shopping is growing fast but it is becoming harder to attract, satisfy and retain customers as the proportion of non-technical users grows and their expectations from online shopping increase.

Providing customers with a satisfying and seamless shopping experience is the key to increasing revenue and winning customer loyalty, but get it wrong even once and your competitors are only a click away. Recent high profile cases of retailers launching inaccessible websites and having to publicly apologise to their customers show that even big players are not immune to making mistakes and paying dearly for them.

IVIS Group helps companies to mitigate these risks and to bridge the gap between the expectations of marketing and management and the skills and availability of IT staff. By implementing a customer-centric and web standards-driven approach to requirements capture, design and implementation we ensure our clients achieve first class web store usability and accessibility that strengthens the brand and keeps customers coming back.

The IVIS Group Approach to Store Design, Usability and Accessibility

IVIS Group takes a unique holistic approach to store design, usability and accessibility developed through more than 10 years of designing and building online stores for some of the largest and most successful retailers including Tesco.com.

Our model starts by evaluating your creative design and branding processes to ensure they meet the needs of your customers and your business objectives, then applying best practice development methodologies using web standards to treat the root causes of poor design, usability and accessibility.

To be successful in this approach requires more than just user interface skills. It requires knowledge of how to design and build the entire system from the database to the business functions and web page presentation. This is where IVIS Group has a distinct advantage. Our background is in designing and building large multi-channel e-business systems, where we have to consider all the components of the system and how they integrate together across channels. We have learnt that excellent long term web store usability and accessibility cannot be guaranteed through work on a single component in isolation, such as the user interface – there are dependencies on the business tiers and database tiers.

IVIS Group Customer-Centric Store-Building Services

IVIS Group has seasoned experts in all areas of online and multi-channel retail strategy, creative and technical design, development and implementation. We can build an online presence for you from scratch, train and mentor your own IT and e-commerce teams to do it in-house or help you fine tune an existing web store. Our store building services are segmented into four key areas – Design & Usability, Creative & Branding, Usability and Accessibility Services which can be delivered as a complete package or individually according to your needs.

Design & Usability Audits

IVIS Group analysts and architects have considerable experience of getting to grips with other people’s designs, processes and architectures. Our audits are aimed at both websites in development and new projects. We review your designs, plans and your processes through workshops with your design team. The following areas are covered:

• The current process by which IT and e-commerce projects are delivered. Reviewing the general process, the roles involved and any differences that e-commerce projects follow. Particular emphasis is placed on learning about any processes that support the look, feel and usability of the solution being implemented


• An analysis of your staff’s understanding of, and competencies in, UI design, usability and accessibility. What these topics mean and how to design, deliver and test for customer-centricity


• The tools you use to design and develop web pages

Creative & Branding Services

We employ a series of short workshops which culminate in the creation of a Creative Direction document. This document can be used to inform all aspects of the design of the proposed website, and doubles as a reference point to validate and justify design decisions later in the process. The workshops generally follow a two-stage process.

The first stage considers the typical customer and their motivations, your brand and its values, the business objectives for the retail site and how your competitors present themselves online. The second stage produces outputs including the central business concept of the site, how the site sounds (its tone of voice), how it might look (the graphical language) and how the site might respond to user behaviour.

The workshops perform knowledge gathering, educational and team building functions which explain to your team what constitutes a good process for UI design and emphasise the importance of collaboration between Marketing, Commercial and Technical teams. The output can be used immediately for informing graphic design activities.

Usability Services

Usability is a wide ranging subject which can be designed for at several levels:

• Usability of the site as a whole - The relevance of features on offer and the ease of navigation around them


• Usability of any individual page - The layout of the features and controls with appropriate instructions to help the users understand what is expected of them


• The ergonomics of individual controls and forms – That they should behave in the manner expected by the customer

Achieving good usability requires specialist expertise in the project team. After evaluating your usability requirements and internal capabilities IVIS Group can provide you with a usability specialist or train one or more of your existing team members to perform this role.

Accessibility Services

Making a website accessible requires technical skills and a revised approach to the technical construction of the web pages to ensure they will read correctly in a wide range of browsers, including special technologies used by sight, hearing or cognitively impaired users. To deliver accessible web pages therefore requires that designers and testers engage with these alternative browser technologies.

Consultants from our user interface team, who have amassed considerable expertise in accessibility and the W3C WAI guidelines and standards conduct an accessibility review of your site and designs. We offer a range of review services to suit your circumstances and all can be tailored to match the complexity of your site and your stated vision and accessibility targets. All reviews place great importance on understanding your business vision in order to place our analysis in perspective.

See also

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  Customer Experience

  Enhancing the Multi-channel Customer Experience