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Sandridge's Sanddlery 

Usability testing on e-commerce website and usability analysis using cognitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluation

Project overview

The chosen system for our project is the ecommerce website for Sandridge Saddlery. Sandridge Saddlery is a well-known equestrian store offering a wide range of equipment, supplies and apparel, as well as equipment rental services. The store services the greater West Island of Montreal and focuses primarily English-style riding apparel and equipment.

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The Challenge

Our user testing's primary goal is to assess the user experience completing core business tasks on the Sandridge Saddlery website so that a) management can prioritize which functionality is worth spending money to improve and b) to give a baseline against which a new system can be compared. 

My Role

As the member with the most experience in UX design and user research, I studies on target group and designed the user testing guideline and process, analyzed and reported user data, and also wrote redesign recommendations. 

Purposes, Goals and Objectives

We used the results of our cognitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluations to formulate our research objectives.

The objective of our user testing is to answer the following questions: 

  • Do the navigation issues predicted in the cognitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluations create significant barriers for potential customers completing their tasks? 

  • Are users able to locate essential information on cluttered web pages? 

  • If so, do they lose significant time searching? Do they get frustrated? 

  • Does the Sandridge Saddlery website meet users' expectations/mental model for an online retail environment when it does not include online purchasing functionality? 

Methodology

The target users for the Sandridge Saddlery website are women aged 18-45 who own horses for recreational purposes. 

Given the COVID-19 pandemic reality, the recruiting process was different as usual. Instead of recruiting subjects from our target demographic, we were forced to recruit three participants from our social circles as the participants in this testing project.

We decided that the study would take place in a natural setting, at the participants' homes, because that is where our target users would most likely be while interacting with the system in real life. The study focused on the usability of the system's desktop version; therefore, a testing environment with a laptop or desktop computer was required to complete the testing. 

We used a within-subjects design, where a single group of participants is allocated to all the experimental conditions. Considering the total number of participants, we decided the best way was to ask all participants to complete all three tasks. The moderator met the participants at their homes. We conducted a 1-hour session with each of the three participants individually. 

Design user tasks

Task 1: Make a purchase

Task 2: Verify store hours

Task 3: Sign-up for Newsletter

Identify interface design issues

Based on our observations and feedback from the participants, we identified a series of interface design issues on the current website. We recorded each problem with its location, task, description, and how many participants encountered the same issue.

Each interface design issue was evaluated on three dimensions: task criticality, impact, and frequency: 

  • Task criticality: how vital is the task affected by the issue. 

  • Impact: how high is the interference of the issue in the experience. 

  • Frequency: the sum of issue occurrences among participants 

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Recommendations

HIGH PRIORITY: Redesign the navigation systemBased on user testing, our users' most significant problem and source of frustration were the confusing navigation system. Therefore, we decided this group to be a high priority. The actions are as follows: 

  • Add drop-down menu for global navigation system 

  • Add a search bar 

  • Regroup the content (by topic) 

  • Add a footer for additional information (contact, address, newsletter) 

  • Maintain consistency (buttons) 

HIGH PRIORITY: Improve the labeling systemWe decided this group is also a high priority due to user experience and cognitive walkthroughs. There were a lot of mistakes made because of inadequate labeling. Recommended actions are as follows: 

  • A product catalog (alphabetical order) 

  • Use language that users are familiar with and close to the real world  

LOW PRIORITY: Improve the aesthetic of the websiteDespite this being the most visible concern from our heuristic evaluations, we have made this a lower priority. Our users did not seem to mind the poor aesthetic choices on this website. More specifically, the actions are as follows: 

  • Fix white spaces 

  • Adopt a more minimalist color palette 

  • Set a guideline for consistent font type and font size 

LOW PRIORITY: Add additional features or functionsThis is another low priority due to the incremental nature of these functions. Should they be added, they will provide positive changes to the website, but these festure are higher priority. These are derived from user feedback. 

  • Add an e-commerce feature that allows users to place online orders 

  • Add an image carousel for product details  

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