New Boston Creative Group

by Chris Ostrom on December 15, 2009

We recently launched a wicked-cool e-commerce website for a local quilting shop, All About Quilts. Besides being enlightened about an entire (seriously devoted, decidedly hard-core) quilting industry and subculture that, honestly, I really didn’t even know existed — I also learned a valuable lesson about developer assumptions and user expectations.

To offer some background, we were within weeks of launching the site when the client and her accountant approached us with a minor request: “Oh, by the way, during the checkout process, we need to be able to calculate tax rates for orders in Kansas on a per-county basis.”

(Gulp) “Huh?!”

Come to find out, Kansas sales tax law requires that taxes collected on in-state, online store purchases be distributed to the customer’s home county — NOT the seller’s county, city, or municipality, as is the case with brick-and-mortar retail stores.

So, essentially the state has put Kansas-based e-stores in the difficult (and, umm, wacky) position of having to sort orders shipped within the state by 105 different counties and calculate sales tax at 105 different rates.

We used an e-commerce system known as Ubercart for the site. And while Ubercart is a veritable Swiss Army knife among open-source shopping cart systems, it (strangely enough) contained no handy gadget for sorting orders by 105 Kansas counties. So without doing a lot of expensive custom programming and database work, we were out of luck. Ultimately, we decided to charge a uniform, upper-range tax rate and put a few simple county fields on the checkout page, where the buyer would enter her or his home county. Consequently, all the county-tax calculations take place after the sale. (Apologies to the accountant, who also happens to be our accountant….sorry, Dee.)

After scouring the Internet several unsuccessful times, I finally at the eleventh hour found a newly minted Ubercart module for adding address fields to the checkout process. Huzzah! Eureka! Woot!

I installed and tweaked it and set up county fields as advertised. It worked flawlessly!

I informed the client that the new fields were on the checkout screen. We rejoiced!

Finally, I waited a few days and logged in to the site to see if there were any orders — the ultimate vindication of our work. Four orders were waiting. YES!

I opened each with expectant joy, in hopes of getting a little karmic love and affirmation for a job well done and, amazingly, three of the four orders were from the same county! Drum roll please…

…The United States of America.

(Sigh…)

This brings me at long last to the nut of this tale — user expectation. Why on earth would anyone put United States of America as the billing or shipping county, especially when the word county is used no less than four times in the field titles and descriptions? I mean, just as there is no “I” in team and no crying in baseball, there is no “R” in county.

The short answer is that, unlike country information, few online stores have had a need to collect the billing or shipping county and, as a result, few consumers expect to enter it when making a purchase.

A lot of research has been done on how people read and, come to find out, we glean as much or more about the intent and meaning of words from the context in which they appear as we do from the words themselves. If we expect the word country to appear in a particular context — and if it makes little or no sense to find the word county in the same context — we’re predisposed to read county as country, no matter how often or how prominently the word county appears (and no matter how much we pray, weep, or curse).

This customer expectation will likely change as more states develop increasingly mucked-up tax codes that require online stores to pay the piper in the consumer’s home county. However, until this happens, United States of America may end up being the biggest county in, well, the United States of America.

In the meantime, on our cool little quilting site, I have changed the county label to read “County or Parish” in hopes that juxtaposing the two words will create a context in which United States of America just doesn’t make sense as an answer. (This, despite the fact that the only civil parishes I can think of in the United States are in Louisiana, though admittedly there may be others.)

So, I suppose the moral of this story is to flaunt user expectation at your own peril. As with the county/country dilemma, for better or worse, web users have contextual expectations about the experience they will have on your website. These expectations may or may not be obvious, and they may or may not be palatable to you. However, if you fail to either meet or accommodate them, you may make life more difficult for yourself. Or worse yet, you may lose traffic, readership, or business to competitors who are willing to cater to your audience.