UK usability consultancy Syntagm says shopping online for a mobile phone means you’re likely to suffer a substandard shopping experience and second-rate service. It also says most mobile phone sales sites suffer from poor navigation, lack of information and very littke online support.
The company’s recent benchmarking report compared the user experience between twelve major online stores: Argos, The Carphone Warehouse, Expansys, mobiles.co.uk, O2, Orange, Phones 4u, Tesco, T-Mobile, 3, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone. They say the appearance of online stores was good, with an overall average of 75% scored for visual design, yet account management scored just 12% and online support scored only 2%.
For example, most sites did not let customers create an account to track or cancel an order. Similarly, all but Expansys failed to let users view or modify recent orders. No site provided immediate customer support online and many sites performed poorly when providing any effective product information.
Expansys was top or joint top in 8 of the 13 benchmarking categories, scoring 62% for overall user experience. O2 was second with 50% and Argos was third with 47%. [Blog]