The holiday shopping season is in full swing, and once again, we find ourselves scrambling to figure out what to buy our friends and family. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone but I still have plenty of shopping to do. My wife started dropping subtle hints about a month ago, but I'm still not confident that what I end up getting her will be what she really wants. And this isn't a new pattern of ours. Every holiday season when we exchange gifts, she thanks me, she smiles at me, she hugs me, and then she inevitably returns everything.

Ecommerce sites should consider how they can personalize their sites using Facebook data, as a new study shows 50% of visitors to ecommerce sites are currently logged in to Facebook. Using Facebook social plugins and Connect integrations, sites can leverage Facebook data to show visitors what friends bought or shared, what products relate to their Likes, and which friends they might want to invite. The study was conducted by Sociable Labs, which helps websites implement social functionality, and looked at 456 million visits to over a dozen ecommerce sites catering to different demographics.

As a social psychologist, I'm interested in how social commerce works. Not for academic reasons, but for a purely practical reason. Understanding why it makes commercial sense to help people to connect where they buy and buy where they connect provides businesses with a strategic advantage; the opportunity to reap the rewards of a powerful insight-led social commerce strategy, as opposed to merely deploying social commerce as a set of tactical tools. Jumping to the conclusion of a rather long post, I think that a psychologically informed understanding of how social commerce works points to the possibility of six particularly effective social commerce strategies.

Inforgraphic on social shopping behaviors & stats

Talk by Janice Fraser at Startup Lessions Learned Conference in May 201. Case Study discussion from Cooper - Tim McCoy - Director, Integrated Product Development, Cooper Case Study: TheLadders - Jeff Gothelf - Director of User Experience, TheLadders Case Study: LUXr NYC - Josh Seiden - Program Director, LUXr NYC Case Study: SideReel - Zach Larson - Entrepreneur/Former CPO, SideReel

Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It's becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space. But I still see a dearth of quality references. When someone asks me for examples, the only good one I can reference is nForm's published nearly two years ago. However, I believe their importance exceeds their prevalence. I'm often asked what defines a good experience map. You could call an experience map a deliverable, although, as the current 4-letter word of UX, that may make some people gag a little bit. But really, it's a model. A model on steroids. It's an artifact that serves to illuminate the complete experience a person may have with a product or service. But it's not just about the illustration of the journey (that would simply be a journey map). And it's not a service blueprint which shows how a system works in enough detail to verify, implement and maintain it.

Eye tracking on Facebook Profile Page

If you're like most of the marketers or business owners I talk with these days, you're wondering what exactly are the benefits of Facebook fans (i.e., "Likes") to your brand. Also, how much more likely are they to do business with you than those who don't "like" you on Facebook? Those who profess to be fans are much more likely to participate in "desirable actions" using Facebook, such as making a purchase, installing an app, entering a sweepstakes or voting online in a contest. That's according to SocialCode, a full-service social agency owned by the Washington Post Company, which looked at 50 brands and more than 5 million Facebook ads over a five-month period earlier this year.

What is the biggest missed opportunity in ecommerce optimization? Is it A/B testing? Performance testing? How about cart recovery? We put a lot of focus on optimizing the cart, getting the customer through to conversion, yet still it's not uncommon to have abandonment rates of 50% or higher. We know a good chunk of abandonment does not occur because the button wasn't big enough or green enough or our web forms are too long. Some got distracted, some wanted to hold items for later, some left and couldn't remember your site URL, some even thought the transaction went through when it did not.

In 2009, ModCloth founder Susan Gregg Koger launched her site's "Be the Buyer" program. It mixes business with pleasure. ModCloth buyers receive excellent data on what garments to buy and, at the same time, get to indulge in their fantasy of being a store buyer.

Over the past 3 days I attended the Internet Retailers Mobile Commerce Forum, where the week's events were filled with insightful and useful information presented by some of the world's leaders in mobile commerce.

Can't get down to South Bay - no fear! Here's a list of all past meeting podcasts.

We know there are a lot of psychological factors that influence purchase behavior online and offline. Here are just a handful of funny things that influence customers to behave the way they do

Importance of reviews if people can't 'try before they buy'. Mentions ModCloth Reviews as 'doing it right'... also some other companies.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, June 26, 2006: We can define usability in terms of quality metrics, such as learning time, efficiency of use, memorability, user errors, and subjective satisfaction. Sadly, few projects collect such metrics because doing so is expensive: it requires four times as many users as simple user testing.

Often we are faced with determining the appropriate number of participants for our usability tests. Too many participants increase the cost and development time. If the number of participants is too small, the testing process may fail to detect important problems and result in reduced site usability.

Question: How many users do you need to test with for a usability test? Answer 1: = 5 users (Jakob Nielsen and Thomas Landauer, 1993). Answer 2: = 15 users (Laurie Faulkner, 2004), PDF file. So, which is it, 5 or 15?

Originally published: Apr 01, 2003 Not so very long ago, it was agreed that five to eight users was enough for a good usability test. Somehow, this idea achieved mythic status. We believed it. We preached it to everyone who would listen.

By Christine Perfetti and Lori Landesman Originally published: Jun 18, 2001 One of the most popular questions we hear from web designers and usability professionals is: "How many users is enough when conducting usability tests?" Until recently, we had believed -- and told our clients -- that it wasn't usually necessary to test with more than eight users.

Looking for 80% convergence