Usability Review and User Experience Insights
August 4, 2011 Leave a comment
Confusion, frustration and irritation all feature heavily in the results of recent user experience testing in which users tackled tasks we set them on three major cinema sites: Cineworld, Empire and Odeon.
What’s on where and when proved difficult to determine as well as struggling to select seats all make interesting viewing.
Click here where all is revealed in our latest Econsultancy blog
February 7, 2011 10 Comments
There’s no better way to chase away the Winter blues than by booking a holiday and having something fun to look forward to. If you can book one that is. This usability review of the Disneyland Paris website left me thinking “How can a multi-billion dollar supposedly consumer-centric business get things so wrong on their website”?
We asked pre-screened users from the WhatUsersDo panel to imagine that they were thinking of treating the family to a weekend away at Disneyland Paris. As they used the site to find a package that they’d genuinely consider buying, their screens and spoken thoughts were recorded into online videos.
Things did not start well. On first entering the site, users are assailed by a musical cinematic fanfare that is so loud that, should you happen to be at work, you can be sure your boss, and probably even your boss’s boss will be alerted to the fact that you are having a few minutes down time on some ‘personal admin’. It’s very unusual for someone to go straight to a site and make a purchase of this size on that first visit so you can expect the trumpeting accompaniment to annoy you not once but each time you enter the site thereafter.
Once the auditory senses have recovered, the eyes can start to take in the confusing array of options on the page. The large moving graphic distracts attention from what are a competing set of navigational options. It is difficult to know not only which option to start from but whether going down one path will preclude you from taking advantage of ‘offers’ from another.
For example, which is the most appropriate top navigation route – ‘Choose your Experience’ or ‘Find your ideal offer’? Within ‘Choose your Experience’ if I have a young family should I pick ‘Families with toddlers’ or ‘Family Adventure’? The user by now is already being asked to think and weigh up far too much .
Language and terminology used in the navigation feels very internal to the Disney organisation, but not that helpful for users: ‘Disney Parks’, “Disney Village’ - can anyone but a seasoned Disneyland visitor instantly know the difference here? The site doesn’t help you to understand what there actually is at Disneyland Paris.
Things did not improve for our users who made it into the booking process. There are several paths into this, each with its own problems. There is a booking form on the home page which several users started with however each ran into different issues.
There is a distinct lack of clear direction through the process and users were unclear of next steps making it unlikely outside the test environment that they would ever be confident enough to complete a booking.
In another example of being confused throughout the booking process, this user was told that the holiday could not be booked on-line and that she must complete the booking by phone . It has been at least 10 years since I have seen that most unhelpful of instructions on a website!
One user, trying to book for two adults and 3 children, was surprised to see that the maximum number of children only went up to two.
Family of five or more? Tough – it seems. Had this user thought to look at the bottom of the form at a badly labelled link and clicked on it, she could have read about a ‘workaround’ for this – make two separate bookings and then ‘link’ the bookings in the order summary screen.
So, the booking system is not flexible enough to cope well with this common scenario and it requires the user to do the leg work. Would it really be so hard to include the number of rooms in the booking criteria?
Elsewhere in the site this simple test uncovered yet another common usability mistake from circa 2001 – not designing to prevent errors and displaying unhelpful error messages when the unwitting inevitably fall into the trap.
The booking form on the home page loads with today’s date as default. Should the user not change that (a blank field is more of a prompt to enter information) then on the next page when the user is required to choose a hotel, they find that all the hotel links are disabled and greyed out. And no, there is no message to inform the user to choose a date – the only instruction on the page is to choose a hotel.
A further example of this painful lack of form validation is in entering dates of birth for children. Should you choose not to do so the form will simply not submit leaving the user hanging on and staring at the unchanging screen.
A further example of this painful lack of form validation is in entering dates of birth for children. Should you choose not to do so the form will simply not submit leaving the user hanging on and staring at the unchanging screen.
Users also uncovered an annoying issue that the site would let you get so far into booking an offer, even to the stage of booking transportation, before telling you that the offer was not available. When you have invested time and effort on the understanding that you had all the information available this is clearly annoying and off-putting.
Booking a holiday can be a nerve-racking process, especially when you’re responsible for other people. There is a lot at stake: time, money and not least happiness. It is important for users to be confident not only that they have made the right decisions but also that their requests will be carried out to the letter once their holiday starts.
Disneyland Paris’ customers undoubtedly get a great experience at the park itself and the strength of the brand will mean many users will put up with a poor online user experience. But, should they have to?
We posted a simple task on WhatUsersDo asking users to imagine that they were thinking of treating the family to a weekend away at Disneyland Paris in Summer and to use the site to find a package that they’d genuinely consider buying which included travel. We screened users specifying that they should have children under 12. We then inserted tags and notes at interesting points during the recording and made our conclusions.
October 25, 2010 2 Comments
So the Christmas cards are in the shops, the first TV ads starting to appear and awkward conversations about whose turn it is so host the big day are starting to happen. Without a doubt Internet shopping has made the whole experience of Christmas shopping a heck of a lot easier for those of us who work. Sometimes however an online experience can be the equivalent of leaving an overcrowded shop empty handed and in a huff such is the lack of usability on the site. Obstacles that exist in the real world e.g. not being able to find an item, crowded shelves, or worse, rude shop assistants, unclear price tags and poorly signposted cash desks all have their equivalents online.
We decided to take a look at Firebox.com, a popular gift site to see how it fared in the run up to Christmas. Firebox sells a huge range of gadgets, toys and games for prices starting from under £5 to over £150. We asked some users to imagine they were buying a gift for a partner or friend for under £10.
First impressions of the site were that it was very busy and overwhelming. This may be a deliberate design on the part of Firebox as it does convey the wealth of items available for sale, but it does not help the user know where to start. However, with the competition only a click away the overwhelmed user may not hang around.
There are several ways to narrow down the range of items available. As well as ‘Top 10’ and ‘What’s New’ lists, on the left there are price brackets and options for who you are buying for. Most of our users opted for a ‘Gift Finder’ option which lets you narrow by person, price and type of gift.
This is another very busy page requiring some effort to sift through the items. The page shows small thumbnail images with item name and price available only when the user mouses over. This was annoying to some users who would have preferred to have that small amount of text in the page itself. The current design makes it impossible to quickly scan the page and mentally select or dismiss items. With such a wide range of stock this design simply adds more work to the purchase process.
With the price limit of £10 the test users altered the price slider on the left to be a maximum of £10. What they found however was that this limit seemed to reset itself to £15 when they came back to this page after viewing the item details page. This caused confusion and annoyance with some believing it was a deliberate ploy on behalf of the retailer. Hopefully this is just a bug in the slider code rather than something more calculated but issues like this can erode the trust a user must have in an online retailer and should be avoided.
On the home page, all the test users had noticed a banner stating delivery was free in October and remembered this when going through the purchase process. On the delivery options page however, the delivery type defaulted to ‘Standard’ delivery which was not free. Not all the users noticed this at first and so were confused as to why their total was more than they expected. This also caused annoyance with one users saying this was “sneaky” - another example of a simple design decision damaging the user’s trust.
The site sells wide range of stock which is perhaps its greatest strength. It also provides, on the face of it, easy tools with which to narrow down the options. However when it comes to the actual usage of these tools there are clearly some serious flaws – in particular the unexpected behaviour in some features and options which could certainly put users off committing to a purchase and more importantly returning to the site in future. Keeping and converting current customers is always less costly than attracting new ones through marketing and advertising and this is a great example of how making a few very simple changes to the usability of the site could achieve this.
Firebox.com could benefit from the following:
We posted a simple task on whatusersdo.com asking users to imagine they wanted to find a gift for a partner or friend under £10 and gave the firebox website address. We specified an age range of 18-35 and any gender. Each user’s session was recorded into an online video. We then inserted tags and notes at interesting points during the recording and made our conclusions.
October 6, 2010 Leave a comment
CRO (or Conversion Rate Optimisation) is all about maximising the number of visitors who take action on your website, be that subscribing, buying or making an enquiry. There are numerous tools (including our own) to help you do this, but where to start if you’ve not done it before?
Google have published a terrific free e-book that’s a good place to start. You can download it here.
A Google tool called Google Website Optimizer features in the e-book (it lets you run conversion experiments on your website), and here’s a great list of alternative tools (but Optimizer is a great place to start not least because it’s free).
September 21, 2010 Leave a comment
We were lucky enough to be interviewed by Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights recently where our founder (Lee Duddell) explained how people use the WhatUsersDo service and how our clients benefit from the User Experience insights it provides.
If you’re not already following Dave or the Smart Insights blog, then we highly recommend that you do – it’s a great source of practical tips and tools to improve your online marketing. There’s a terrific post today on how you can get more sales and leads from your website.
April 14, 2010 2 Comments
We love Live Chat at whatusersdo. It’s easy to implement, affordable and great for Customer Service. Now we are using it as a Conversion Tool in its own right to provide fresh insight into what visitors are thinking on specific pages and funnels.
Here’s how it started.
A few months back Google Analytics was telling us we had a problem with a specific landing page. We were seeing high bounce rates coupled with low repeat visits. We wanted to understand why that was happening and needed some qualitative insight into visitors’ thoughts.
As an experiment we installed Zopim (other Live Chat clients are available) on the problem landing page and sat by our computers waiting for visitors to ask us questions. A trend soon emerged, with more than 75% of people asking the same thing.
A few (that is sooo obvious!) slaps to our foreheads and we soon fixed the problem with a small (but important) copy addition to the landing page that did the trick. It was a quick and dirty but very effective way to understand the why behind what Analytics was telling us.
Of course it can’t work in every situation, but we found it insightful and an interesting way to understand what users are thinking.
