In this section you will find a collection of articles all about us and what we've been doing lately, including a selection of clippings from the local press. We always like to keep our customers informed about what we're up to.
Our Research News & Views
Selfridges – Our Eye Tracking Review
July 31st, 2010
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.
SimpleUsability First to Use Ground-Breaking Eye-Tracking Glasses Technology
June 22nd, 2010
SimpleUsability is the first in the world to use revolutionary eye tracking glasses from Tobii. Today, the 22nd June, the new Tobii glasses were released, but here at SimpleUsability, with support from Tobii through AcuityETS, we were able to use them for commercial research before their launch.
This revolutionary new product is able to support eye tracking, being the first of its kind as it is lightweight, mobile and allows us to monitor truly natural behaviour. The glasses look like an ordinary, if not slightly larger, pair of glasses allowing participants to carry out daily tasks. For our latest project we visited a number of supermarkets across the UK, watching how people perform their weekly shop. Each user would be given the set of glasses and left to do their food shopping. After they had finished we would play back sections of their shop, showing their eye tracking, enabling them to recall their behaviour and feelings.
Traditionally we have focused on using screen based eye tracking technology, but now, with these new glasses, we are rolling out new services to take our proven methodology into live retail environments. We can now tell you how long customers spend looking at a specific aisle, picture, fixtures etc. as well as where their focus is.
We now have the ability to show you how customers react across any situation and give a real insight into both conscious and subconscious behaviour during everyday life.
Contact Guy or Rozanne at SimpleUsability for further information.
SimpleUsability founder invited to speak EyeTrackUX Conference
May 31st, 2010We’ve attended all of the EyeTrackUX conferences to date and this year we’ve been invited to speak about how we use eye tracking within our research business.
In his session, Guy will share how we run our research sessions using a retrospective protocol and it’s embedded in most aspects of our UX research at SimpleUsability. He hopes to inspire more practitioners to use more retrospective protocols in their research and dispel a few myths about what retrospective techniques achieve. He will also take this opportunity to share his thoughts on why we need to promote retrospective eye tracking research over traditional research techniques.
The conference is runs over two days in Leuven, Belgium. More details can be found on the EyeTrackUX website http://www.eyetrackux.com
Launch of New Research Recruitment Service for Yorkshire
May 30th, 2010
Research Helper – www.research-helper.co.uk is a new portal for volunteers to register for taking part in market research in Leeds. Aimed at the residents of Yorkshire, it allows people to sign up with SimpleUsability once to remain on our books.
We currently have a research panel of over a thousand volunteers and we’re keen to grow that to ensure we can match the right users to our growing research needs. SimpleUsability is thought to be unique in it’s policy of only using people once for in-depth sessions. Many of our competitors re-use participants within a varrying timeframe. We prefer to use people only once and then incentivise attendees to help us find new people for our research.
Resarch Helper will be headed up by the latest addition to the team, Rozanne.
For further information email info@research-helper.co.uk
The Market for Uncertainties
May 19th, 2010Taking the element of luck from the research procedure.
The Truth, when a marketer tells you that’s what they’ve found you’d better run. Marketing is looking for “Target Audiences” unfortunately marketers have forgotten that these “Target Audiences” are actually people. The problem they have, is they find it hard to connect with real people, because they don’t ever see any, all they see is “Target Audiences”.
When they set out to run focus groups, build personas, embark on any testing, they’ve already accepted the futility of it all, they know that the truth is hidden to them, so they’re just going through the motions. They know that the majority of decision-making is from the subconscious and they have no way of getting to it.
With eye tracking technology you can find out not what people say they saw, but reveal what they really did see. We do this not by analysing “heat maps” but driving out insights through retrospective recall sessions with users. The evidence is compelling; it allows users to express the familiar, describe the journey, and reveal the subconscious decision-making taking place whilst exploring your offerings.
Boden – Our Eye Tracking Review
May 10th, 2010
Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the new Boden website for the July edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The article can be read here: Boden Eye Tracking Article
Users were asked to buy a new summer outfit for themselves and one of their teenage children or a younger relative. Users were quickly drawn to the main graphic on the homepage. The women looked around the homepage to get started rather than use the primary navigation because it looked to them that the ‘Women’ tab was already selected.
Users reacted positively to the photography used on the website, and each section or category had a large banner. Users often looked longer and tried to hover the mouse over these products, but could not find out which products were being featured in the photography. Within the ‘Occasionwear shop’ users became confused because the main graphic looked like it contained navigation items e.g. ‘Summer wedding’. The users looked to the left hand navigation, but the titles were not available and the user had to scroll to find this section.
We observed that the women’s drop down menu was slightly harder for users to scan due to some of the titles wrapping over onto two lines.
When accessing product information, users saw the ‘Outfit maker’ icon when their eyes moved downwards from the title to the size selection. This was a help to users who would normally struggle to put an outfit together, and their eyes were drawn to immediately choose a category. Users were really looking for suggested products against the one item that they had chosen at this point, so they often clicked on the ‘Outfit ideas’ category which didn’t give them what they expected. Some users became frustrated when paging through the products within the ‘Outfit maker’ from the bottom of the page. They had to be careful to select ‘Next’ because clicking on the arrow icon made all the products disappear.
When looking for items for a teenager, users were unaware that the ‘Johnnie B’ primary navigation section was relevant to them. It was only when the user hovered over that tab and saw the ‘Teen boys’ and ‘Teen girls’ titles that they knew where to go. The navigation item of ‘Johnnie B’ disappeared if users were within the ‘Outfit maker’.
When users had decided on which product they wished to buy they clicked on a size and the green tick appeared. Users then looked up to the shopping bag in the right hand corner of the screen and didn’t always realise that they had to click on ‘Add to bag’ to move forward with their purchase.
SimpleUsability have been providing expert eye tracking advice for the readers of Internet Retailing Magazine since 2009.
Apple – Our Eye Tracking Review
March 11th, 2010
Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the new Apple website for the March 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.
Asos – Our Eye Tracking Review
January 6th, 2010
Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the new Asos website for the July edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The article can be read here: Asos Eye Tracking Article
Participants looking at the ASOS website for an outfit immediately accessed the mega drop down menus from the top primary navigation titles. They generally accessed either the ‘Women’ or ‘Men’ sections. From the eye tracking data, we observed users accessing a drop down menu and their eyes continuing straight down. This meant that they would see the ‘Shop by products’ sub-categories very quickly but often miss the other options available to them such as ‘Shops’, ‘Inspire me’ and ‘What’s on trend’.
Users liked the filters available on the left hand side of the page when accessing a sub category section. The price slider was particularly popular because users could set a minimum price as well as a maximum price. Some users became confused when they could not reset filters by clicking on greyed out titles instead of clicking on the ‘clear’ link beside each filter title. After selecting a filter, the central page faded to grey and a timer appeared to let the user know that something was happening. We saw that the users noticed that this was happening and waited for the filters to finish loading. When filters do not acknowledge that the user has told the website to do something in an obvious way within the user’s field of view, then users try and click again and this leads to confusion. After this process happens, other filter titles become grey and are unavailable for the user to click on. Within a filter section such as ‘Brand’ users often missed that they could scroll past greyed out options to access more brand names that were available.
Users perceived the photographic product detail information to be of high quality. Although many users missed the option, users accessing the catwalk option found it extremely helpful.
SimpleUsability have been providing expert eye tracking advice for the readers of Internet Retailing Magazine since 2009.
House of Fraser – Our Eye Tracking Review
September 20th, 2009
Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the new House of Fraser website for the July edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The article can be read here: House of Fraser Eye Tracking Article
We asked participants to find a gift on the House of Fraser website. From the homepage, eye tracking showed us that users were attracted to the main rotating graphic. These panels were predominantly targeted at women, so the variety of products available was not immediately obvious to all users. Once into a section, users normally needed to scroll before viewing the second line of products. One user actually complained about the ‘excessive’ scrolling, as she worked her way through the screens of hand bags.
Users experienced particular difficulty when looking for a product that was contained within a section with multiple categories. One user was looking for some cufflinks and browsed from ‘Gifts for him’ to the ‘Cufflinks, belts and ties’ section. There were 302 products available in this section, but there was no way for users to narrow down their search to just cufflinks, so the user was forced to page through all the results. Filtering by the colour ‘silver’ helped bring up a few cufflinks, but the user could not be confident that they had seen all the products.
It became apparent from the unsettled eye movements that users became confused when unexpected items appeared within categories. The only two products in the women’s gloves section were actually belts and the clearance gift vouchers and cards section only contained flip flops. This made participants question whether they were in the correct place and quickly eroded confidence in the navigation.
Some users hunted for the search box, as it was not immediately obvious because it was pre-filled in with text and a grey fill. Users who failed when browsing for a product often resorted to the search to find a product. When a user searched for ‘cufflinks’, they got 308 results, with the first two products listed being belts – which added to the confusion.
When accessing the product information page for a particular product, we observed that users were quickly drawn to, and distracted by, the related items and the ‘more from this brand’ tab for the actual product. This often distracted users away from their original purchase. This type of page sometimes included a device that contained a scroll bar. Users found it very difficult to scan the supporting text for the product because of this.
Overall, users loved the high quality, zooming photography and the overall feel of the site, but were then annoyed by the unnecessary scrolling and common errors in merchandising.
SimpleUsability have been providing expert eye tracking advice for the readers of Internet Retailing Magazine since 2009.
Argos – Our Eye Tracking Review
July 4th, 2009
Our team conducted an eye tracking review of the new Argos website for the March edition of Internet Retailing Magazine. The article can be read here: Argos Eye Tracking Article
Users were asked to choose a barbeque for themselves on the Argos website and reserve it for collection. Participants confidently browsed the site’s navigation and easily found the empty search box. Once into the BBQ section, the guided navigation worked well for those users who didn’t use search. However, users that searched for barbeques off the home page were distracted by the two recommended products on the results page and ignored the search results found below the page-fold.
Eye tracking showed us that users made their shortlists primarily based on product images and product names; then used price for final selection. During the selection process some users sorted the items in price order.
It was quite apparent that users struggled to reserve products, muddling their way through to completion. Users failed to understand the difference between checking whether an item was available for collection and then having to repeat the process to actually reserve the item at their chosen store. We could see users’ eyes bouncing between the information in the trolley saying the item was available for collection and then cautiously reading the options below it for choosing collection, home delivery and signing up for an Argos credit card.
One user gave up searching for a store that had their chosen BBQ in stock as he had to exhaustively check each store with no help from the system with regard to stock levels or how far away the store was. For the users that made it through to the page where they started to confirm a reservation, they incorrectly keyed in both postcode and town name and then looked at the ‘OR’ and realised they only needed to provide one.
Users were distracted by the “*must be completed” on the final page of the reservation process, completely missing the “get a copy of your reservation details” title and then going to the text box for providing their email address, without understanding what this was for.
There are clear opportunities for improving the user journey when reserving an item for collection. We didn’t expect to see a user get so frustrated and abort an order with such a mature retail website.
SimpleUsability have been providing expert eye tracking advice for the readers of Internet Retailing Magazine since 2009.