Our team  conducted an eye tracking review of the new Boden website for the April 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.