Archive for the ‘Usability Reviews’ Category
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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Our team conducted an eye tracking review of M&S multi-channel activity over the 2010 Christmas season for the January edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The abbreviated article can be read here: M&S Mobile Website Eye Tracking Article
We ran a range of tasks relevant to Christmas, either browsing for a last minute present or choosing an outfit for the festive season. The cross channel experience allows users to be more demanding about the vehicle that they use to shop, and the expectations that they bring with them to that experience. This is a huge challenge for companies when providing functionality across multiple routes, in this case website, mobile website, TV and in store.
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Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the new GAP website for the November edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The article can be read here: Gap Eye Tracking Article
The participants who took part in the research for the new gap.eu website were asked to go shopping to replace their favourite pair of jeans.
From the new homepage we were able to observe that users were drawn to the strong colours on the right hand side of the page (graphic outlined by union jack). Users ignored the main photographic element with the ‘New and now’ messaging, and decided to go straight to the top navigation options. From here there were no drop-down menus available so users could not quickly get into the category that they were looking for.
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Users always surprise because their behaviour changes with their environment. The online experience, and more specifically the tools that users have available to them when searching, is evolving with the introduction of Google Instant and Google Instant Preview and behaviour will be changing again.
Google Instant Previews allows users to see what a website looks like before committing to click through to the website. Next to each listing on the results page a magnifying glass icon appears. After users click on this once, a preview appears of that page to the right hand side. Subsequent hovering over other search results listings also previews pages.
There is much consternation about the consequences of this and how it will affect users and also affect future website design. It has the potential to support websites that adopt a greater user centred design approach based on the fact that users quickly make decisions on suitability from the first glance of a website.
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Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the new Sainsbury’s website for the September edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The article can be read here: Sainsbury’s Eye Tracking Article
We invited a few current online Sainsbury’s shoppers to carry out their weekly shop in our eye tracking studio. Shoppers started at one end of the grocery primary navigation shopping first in the Fresh section, moving on to Bakery etc. Although they had logged into their accounts, “none of the participants used the ‘My usuals’ or ‘shopping list’ features as they were concerned about missing offers” – isn’t this interesting? Customers always amaze!
Once into a product category, images were incredibly important to the shoppers. Participants scanned down the list of photos looking for familiar products, scanning across to the name and price afterwards. Most shoppers had an idea in their head of what something should cost, and hence used price as a sense check to confirm they were buying the right size or correct product.
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Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the new Selfridges website for the July edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The article can be read here: Selfridges Eye Tracking Article
With Father’s Day approaching users were asked to shop for a gift for a man on the Selfridges’ website.
From the homepage users hesitated to get started because the page was filled with one large graphic that advertised the sale. Users were forced to interact with the primary navigation drop down menus. Some users found this quite difficult, because when accessing the ‘Menswear’ drop down menu the ‘Categories’ section started with three unexpected titles ‘SALE’, ‘NEW IN’ and ‘ONLY AT SELFRIDGES’ which were displayed in upper case. This made the category list very hard to scan and choose an area to start browsing from.
When accessing a category, eg ‘Shirts’ from ‘Menswear’, users were shown a page that had a low number of products as its default. We observed that users were looking around the page to access more products. It was not always obvious that the user could change the number of items displayed from the ‘View by’ section in the top right hand corner of the screen. This display was quite different to other clothing retail websites that users were familiar with, and some users were looking for links to subsequent pages from the bottom right hand corner of the page. Users had choices on the right hand side of the page to narrow down the products displayed.
Users had already selected a category eg ‘Shirt’. The title ‘Category’ title was repeated on the right hand side, but expanded underneath it was types of shirt, eg ‘Check’, ‘Plain’, etc. This small inconsistency did not help with the browsing confidence of the user. The top filter was expanded but the others were not so users often missed these filters and did not understand how to interact with the titles.
SimpleUsability have been providing expert eye tracking advice for the readers of Internet Retailing Magazine since 2009.
Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the new Apple website for the February edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The article can be read here: Apple Eye Tracking Article
We told users to think of somebody they’d gift an iPod to and then asked them to buy one directly from Apple online. Most users Googled ‘apple’ and accessed the UK home page from the natural listings. The rest just went directly into www.apple.com.
All users quickly clicked into the iPod + iTunes section and their eyes were instantly attracted to the different iPods from the top strip. The colourful iPod photography instantly drew the users’ eyes. All of the content about the various devices attracted different levels of attention, showing how users are easily drawn towards appropriate content. Amazingly, once the users had chosen an iPod, they struggled to move on and buy it due to the separation of online shop and content.
Users were expecting some form of buy button or a strong call to action. They checked the top and bottom of the pages and missed the secondary navigation that had a blue ‘buy now’ button tagged on the end. Users really had to read the pages. Some tried clicking on prices and then they eventually found the links to the Apple online store.
For those users who had gone directly to apple.com by typing the url into the address bar, we noticed they were distracted by the pricing in dollars and then struggled to find a way into the UK store. Clicking on the USA lozenge at the bottom of the page eventually sent users to the UK home page, which looked just like the original USA page.
Once in the UK store most users struggled to choose from the iPod nano range since they initially failed to realise that they needed to select a model from the matrix of ‘select’ buttons. Users looked up and down the page trying to find traditional buy functionality. All users figured it out, but the journey from home to buy seemed to be more difficult than we expected it to be from Apple.
SimpleUsability have been providing expert eye tracking advice for the readers of Internet Retailing Magazine since 2009.