M&S website voted user-friendly

Website usability is important to high street brands

The websites of UK high street brands Marks and Spencer and WHSmith are the most user-friendly, a report finds.

The Online High Street Report, from web usability consultancy Webcredible, finds the newly-launched M&S site much improved - last year it ranked ninth.

John Lewis maintained its third position while fourth and most improved was Boots.

The now online-only Woolworths brand improved its usability score from 65% to 80%.

"No less than five have scored 80% or more for website usability, which is unprecedented," said Trenton Moss, director of Webcredible.

"This is no doubt, largely down to online shopping revenues continuing to increase despite the recession, that the user experience of retailers' websites is a key point of differentiation in such a competitive market place," he added.

The criteria used to evaluate the websites includes browsing, navigation, the checkout process , searching and product display pages.

Despite widespread improvements, there are some basic areas where retailers need to do better on, the report found.

Areas that could be improved include using the same form for logging on and registering, allowing customers to alter the number of products displayed on a page and changing the colour of visited links.