Testing The Website

I took a screen grab of the Sainsbury’s website and asked three people the following questions:

Have you seen this website before?

What is the first thing you notice?

Do you like the colour scheme?

From your first impression what is the website about?

Is there anything you don’t like about the website?

 

Two of the users had seen this website before, the third had heard of the supermarket but never visited it online. the immediate impressions of the website were that it was very cluttered, the first thing they noticed and that stood out the most was the home insurance advert. When asked about the colour scheme people said it was boring but what you expect from a supermarket website. All three of the participants knew  that it was a supermarket website and when asked about what they disliked one said “the colour” the second said “text is a little small”  and the third said “not really bothered".

 

I then read this script to the participants:

“your task is to navigate the Sainsbury's website for groceries and purchase five items, one of the items you will have price check making sure that it is the cheapest. These are the items you will need to buy:

1. 2 pints of organic semi skimmed milk
2. a bottle of red wine that costs no more than £5
3. one tin of chopped tin tomatoes
4. one tin of spaghetti (price check)
5. wholemeal unsliced bread

after you have selected the items you will have to go to the checkout using the details provided, then finally you must select a time and date for home delivery.

Finally i asked them to verbalise what they were doing, what they were feeling, and what they were thinking”

I didn't have a video camera to record my results because i had originally planned to get the users to navigate the site at a later date, because i was running ahead of schedule i decided to do the site navigation the same day, afterwards i realised this lead to the problem of not having any consent forms or questionnaire's done to collect information about the participants.

The first subject navigated the site well to get the products in the basket but he did accidentally click the wrong links at some points, he did let me know it wasn't because of the website it was because he wasn't used to using the touchpad on a laptop. The second problem he encountered was trying to find the checkout button, it took him a few seconds to realise where it was.

The second subject also did well on the navigation but it did take him a few seconds longer to find where things were on the site, this could have been due to his level of competence with computers, when he had finally finished the list i had to prompt him that he had put an incorrect item in the shopping trolley, he then asked how to take the sliced wholemeal bread out the trolley and replace it with unsliced. I asked him if he could try and figure it out for himself, he went back to the bread section of the website to see if he could remove it from there but then after 5 minutes or so removed it from the trolley section on the right by clicking on the dustbin next to the item name.

The third subject got frustrated very quickly as this was her first time online shopping, she said she felt she was going from page to page to get to an item and then having to go back to get to the next item. This was the most time consuming of the user tests as she kept navigating back to the home page to get to the next item. She compared it to “walking back to the doors of a supermarket in between putting items in the trolley”, then after putting the spaghetti in the trolley she realised that she didn’t have to click the back button of Firefox.

After these user test it clarified that the buttons were maybe a bit small and that people overlooked them, maybe making the buttons slightly larger and a little more obvious would increase productivity. I had originally planned to test the users and what the colour scheme also but, later realised that the orange colour they had on the website was a signature colour of Sainsbury's, if i were to change it it would mean they would have to change every colour across Britain.