Archive for the ‘Usability Reviews’ Category
For the last six months, I have walked into the centre of Leeds to work every day. It’s 1.8 miles each way and I’m secretly very smug about my average daily step count because of it. But sometimes, I don’t want to walk all that way. Sometimes, I would like to be able to take a comfy seat and travel in to the city centre a bit differently. As it happens, Leeds offers a form of public transport that runs down the exact same route that I walk, which would get me to work 10 minutes quicker, and it’s free. Leeds Dock Water Taxis have been offering a free service from Leeds Dock to Granary Wharf near Leeds Train Station for a few years now and I have often used it on weekends.
My walking route to SimpleUsability and the Leeds water taxi stops
It seems almost everyone is on the Monzo hype at the moment, even Martin Lewis has jumped on the band wagon. So when we heard Monzo were coming to town last week, we were keen to go along and find out more about what they are getting up to! We learnt how they are shaking up the user experience of banking, guided by their 3 pillars of UX, innovative tech and customer service. They went on to explain that they are no longer focussing on their early adapters and trying to reach out to the wider community.
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A User Journey Walkthrough is a great way to put yourself in your users shoes, and using a persona is the ideal way to do this. A persona allows you to focus on your users, therefore keeping their goals and needs at the forefront of the Walkthrough. A persona is based on findings from user research, and can also combine analytics and other customer information. As the purpose of this article is to show you how to use the User Journey Walkthrough methodology, here is one I created earlier:
Fig 1: Savvy Sally persona.
In 2015, UK shoppers spent more than £3.3 billion over Black Friday weekend, a rise of 31% on the previous year and many big name websites including Tesco, Argos and John Lewis couldn’t cope with the online traffic. With the growth of online shopping and more retailers taking part in this year’s Black Friday promotions, analysts were predicting a further increase of 25% in 2017 but early figures suggest this didn’t materialise.
While the marketeers continue to review the economic factors, we reviewed the way some clothing websites promoted their Black Friday deals. From our experience of user behaviour when shopping online, we noticed a few things they could have done to improve engagement and potentially increase sales.
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JUNE 2014 – Appliance ecommerce sites
Introduction
With the Online Experience Index, we aim to identify which ecommerce sites are leading the way in providing a powerful customer experience.
In March we reviewed fashion e-commerce sites and found variation in the levels of usability between the sites, as well as identifying some recurring trends and issues.
Following on from March’s review of clothing retail websites, this report reviews the websites of four retailers of appliances: Appliances Online, Appliances Direct, Currys and Argos. Reviews were performed in the week of 19th May 2014.
In addition to the main Index, we have also included scores for accessibility, mobile and persuasion, emotion and trust (PET) techniques, to explore a broader scope of the online experience.
Headline findings
As expected in this mature, competitive sector, sites featured relevant and engaging content with detailed product information.
- There is room for improvement in the checkout, where forms need to improve.
- One retailer failed to have a mobile friendly site, and another had a site that annoyingly jumped between mobile and desktop layouts.
- Filters were generally well-implemented, featuring a comprehensive range of criteria.
- Shipping costs were communicated well on all sites, within the main user journey.
- All retailers used a range of PET techniques without overwhelming the customer.
March 2014 – Fashion ecommerce sites
Introduction
Understanding, measuring and improving the customer experience is a pretty fundamental part of everything we do at SimpleUsability.
Whether we’re working on competitor/comparator testing at the start of a project, multi-platform testing across a number of devices, or an expert review, our research and the resulting recommendations help our clients to improve their customer experience and benefit from the associated commercial gains around improved conversion or internal cost savings.
Whilst usability or accessibility scales are common place, our intention with the Online Experience Index is to apply 30+ years of combined user experience knowledge to benchmark the overall user experience within specific ecommerce verticals and identify who is leading the way in delivering a powerful customer experience.
We report here a review of clothing retail websites Marks & Spencer, Hobbs, Karen Millen, French Connection, Boden, Oasis and Fat Face. Reviews were performed in the week of 10 March 2014.
Headline findings
- Most sites communicated their brand and purpose of website well
- The main navigation was clear and descriptive on most sites
- Few provided support for search or clearly indicated the order of search results
- Product pages were comprehensive and pricing clearly indicated
- Most sites supported customers through the checkout process well, however, few allowed users to make a purchase without setting up an account
Methodology
In order to score each site’s overall experience rating, a panel of expert UX professionals assessed the site in the context of a core user journey of browsing and purchasing an item.
The examiners rated the site on over 120 key touchpoints, which were tailored to provide a thorough, representative picture of the user experience. These were systematically weighted to denote the relative importance of each individual aspect of the site, and were designed to span multiple facets of the user journey, including homepage, navigation, search and product pages, as well as the flow and usability of the checkout process. From this, an individual rating was able to be drawn up for each facet, based on the overall usability.
In order to emulate a naturalistic user experience, examiners conducted the review whilst undertaking the task of browsing for and selecting items for an outfit, and proceeded to purchase these items as a new customer to that online brand.
The Index, by facet
Considering each facet of the user journey in turn, we found a variation of design usability across the websites that is highlighted through their individual ratings. The following diagrams illustrate the best and worst individual ratings by facet of the user journey.
The homepage announces the brand identity and the purpose of the website. Most of the sites in this review did this well, with the identity in the header and purpose of the website clearly shown above the fold. One site, French Connection, did something different. Their identity is dropped to the footer where it might be missed by users familiar with finding the logo and identity in the header.
In general navigation was done well in these sites, using a top level menu in the header with drop downs for the sub categories. The labelling was clear and descriptive with few examples of jargon. All sites honoured the back-button and most made good use of breadcrumbs to help locate users and provide additional navigational routes.
Sites should, however, take care that navigation is clear and distinctive from other elements of the site. For example, the header on Hobbs crowds the main navigation menu with the search, basket and sign in elements that may overwhelm and confuse users. One site, Fat Face, used an innovative form of navigation that may confuse users new to the site.
All site provided a search function for users and on most sites this was easy to find in or close to the header. Few sites, however, offered search prompts to help users type in search terms and few offered suggestions for spelling mistakes or zero results sets.
In general search results were displayed in a similar layout to product listings, enabling users to interact with them in a familiar way. However, it was not always clear what order results were displayed in or how many results were available. French Connection, for example, displays a count of results much higher than the number of items displayed and obscures the function to sort the results under the Filter link so the casual user may be very confused.
Most sites provided well organised filters that enabled users to narrow their results within several categories. For some sites, for example Karen Millen and French Connection, features within the filters were displayed with very low contrast that may cause problems for users with visual impairments.
In general the sites broke down the process into several stages and clearly indicated the stages up front. Most also allowed users to move backwards and forwards in the stages to enable them to make changes. Few sites allowed users to make a purchase as a guest, so unlike buying from a high street store, the user was forced to set up an account with the site to make a purchase.
The Index visualisations
The following diagrams draw together the individual ratings to visualise, by retailer, the user experience across all facets of the user journey.
Oasis
Total index score: 80%
Karen Millen
Total index score: 78%
FCUK
Total index score: 74%
Hobbs
Total index score: 81%
Fat Face
Total index score: 72%
Boden
Total index score: 83%
Marks & Spencer
Total index score: 86%
Watch out for our next online experience index which will have some new features including; persuasion centred design and scores based on the mobile experience.
We’ll be adapting our index to add sector specific questions and omit areas of the index that are not as relevant depending on the subject that we are reviewing.
Our plan is to target particular categories and topics moving forward. We’ll be looking at how well department stores are bringing multiple department shopping experience to end customers, and looking at specific categories such as shoes and younger fashion.
Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the Thomson website for the September edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The full article can be read here: Thomson Website Eye Tracking Article.
We invited users to participate in booking a holiday on the Thomson website. They were asked to have a destination and booking party in mind and add on any specific requirements they would need. Eye tracking technology was used to observe how the users would navigate through the site during the holiday booking process.
Once on the Thomson homepage one user was immediately attracted by the ‘Late deals’ option. This took them to a landing page showing over 33,000 holiday deals which the user found overwhelming. The results were already arranged in lowest price order but this was not obvious to the user. Clicking on the column heading rearranged the date order of the results, but again we saw the user looking around the page because she had failed to realise that anything hand changed due to the listings looking so similar.
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Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the Mr Porter website for the July edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The full article can be read here: Mr Porter Website Eye Tracking Article.
We invited users to participate in sessions to explore the Mr Porter website. Users were either asked to purchase a replacement item of clothing or to buy a gift for someone. By using eye tracking, we were able to observe users’ natural behaviour as they interacted with the website.
Upon entering the website, users were drawn to the large promotion image that took up three quarters of the screen. However, due to the home page offering editorials over products, the users immediately resorted to using the main navigation to either select the department they were after, or the ‘What’s new’ if they were just browsing.
Users responded favourably to the layout of the products when browsing. After accessing a department landing page, they were drawn to the large images and were content to scroll down a long list of results.
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Our team conducted an eye tracking review of Waitrose for the May edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The full article can be read here: Waitrose Website Eye Tracking Article.
We invited users to participate in sessions to explore the new Waitrose.com website. These were people who shopped online and had different levels of experience regarding using grocery websites. By using eye tracking technology we were able to observe users shopping naturally for basic items that they would regularly need.
Users struggled to find the most basic of items. The simplified initial drop down menu for ‘Groceries’ was limited.In order to find bread, users had to learn to click on ‘Cupboard’>’Food’>’Bakery’ and then choose an additional category such as ‘Sliced bread’.
This was felt to be a long route to individual items. It was not obvious how these sections were ordered within the navigation area displayed at the top of the page,with some users commenting that they expected to see the most common sections first.
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Our team conducted an eye tracking review of DIY.com for the March edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The full article can be read here: B&Q Website Eye Tracking Article.
Participants were taken to the B&Q home page and asked to find products that they could buy from B&Q that would reduce heating bills. Most users scanned over the various menus at the top of the page and then hovered over the black buttons and worked their way through the mega-dropdowns. Users were initially frustrated with the complexity of the menus and the way they changed if their mouse clipped a corner when going to click.Participants were unable to predict where a product would be within the menus as the structure seemed random to them.
Where would you expect to find ‘loft insulation’? Later on, some users were further annoyed with the huge mega-dropdown obscuring page content, if they moved their mouse to the top.
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