Website Review Example [PDF]

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Website Review – example Summary of findings This report discusses a review of the User Experience (UX) of the Your Site Here website. A number of areas were found where improvements can to be made to the site design, navigation, and content. The navigation has several design flaws and needs re-building. The two-column page layout is not helping expose content Content is confused in places and needs reviewing across the site. Important information, headings, and links are lost in the current design and typography schema. Opportunities to jump ahead of the market via online customer service are not being taken on the site. We recommend improvements to the design of the current site, with an emphasis on making it quick and easy to use, providing direct access to ordering systems, and developing a mobile site focused on ordering.



UX review A review of the user experience of the site picked up the following issues and concerns about the way the site works for people using it.



The Homepage A good measure of a company homepage is whether a visitor can tell at-first-glance what the company does and what can be achieved on their website. It’s pretty clear on arriving at this homepage what the site is about and what the company does. Showing the duck not only communicates purpose at-a-glance but helps connect to the company branding people see around town. The repetition of the order links seems unnecessary on the homepage, while the label “Quick Links” is not the best and would not be necessary either if the links were more distinct on the page – like the buttons in fact. Online ordering Looking at the market on the web it is clear no one else is providing such easy access to online ordering as Duck Soup. It is easy to find the online form to make an order. But Duck Soup could lift their game even further by taking the serviceorientated approach taken by McDuffs several years ago. Like many companies , when McDuffs first went online they put ordering at least a click away from the homepage. Now everyone has their ordering widget on the homepage. This could easily be achieved by ham pancetta pork chop tri-tip biltong t-bone pork loin hamburger jowl. Frankfurter pastrami boudin spare ribs.



Navigation The main site navigation is well located, and easy to find and use. However, it is not consistent across the site and changes suddenly and unexpectedly when one goes to the order fuel pages. This is potentially very confusing to people using the site and provides a poor user experience. This is how the navigation looks on most of the site:



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Wired Internet Group, date 2013



However, when a visitor goes to the Place an Order pages, the link under the Fuel Delivery button changes into a duck. Clicking the duck button on the Place an Order pages leads to a completely different page, which displays a completely different top navigation menu, a shown below.



People are very likely to get lost in the site as a result. On top of this, hidden information not discoverable from the usual navigation is suddenly revealed in this new navigation; Forms and Links & Advice. Location indicator When using the website the current page indicator is a small triangle at the bottom of the nav bar (see example below taken from the About page). The trouble is, when hovering the mouse over the navigation the hover state uses the same triangle indicator which is not distinct enough from the current page indicator. We suggest using a different hover state to indicate hover links, or a different way to indicate the current page. Quick Links area As mentioned above, the repetition of the 0800 numbers and Quick Links area across the site is a good idea, but the implementation of it on the site is flawed and needs improvement to remove some UX problems.



UX research has clearly shown that putting things in unexpected places on websites risks people over-looking them 1 when they need them. There is also a well-documented phenomenon of people developing ad or banner blindness when using a website, mistaking a repeated area as advertising or something they don’t need: When searching for specific information on a website, users focus only on the parts of the page where they assume the relevant information will be, small text and hyperlinks. Visually the 0800/Quick Links area appears within the content region on the page, so despite it being repeated in the same place across the site, there is a high likelihood it will be easily over-looked by people scanning for information. Pork loin bacon shank ball tip swine boudin salami pancetta jowl pork venison spare ribs bresaola. Frankfurter capicola tri-tip ground round venison chicken drumstick short ribs shankle ham jowl sirloin pork belly ribeye kielbasa. Prosciutto strip steak tenderloin rump pastrami pig jerky leberkas shank.



Page Design and Typography It takes longer than expected to realise that this site has a duck on every page as the arrangement of the content on the pages is rather odd. People are used to one main area of content and then secondary content being another column, but the space is poorly used and provides no hierarchy to the content on the page. For instance, the About Us page has some great history information about the company in the left column, but a very odd insert of images from the company founder’s amazing duck museum in the right column, without any context in the text.



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Norman, D. A., "Commentary: Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design", 1999, Internet Technical Group



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Wired Internet Group, date 2013



The use of type on the site is generally good, with a clean, easily-read body font. The heading fonts could be better in places though, as they are too close to other items on the page and don’t stand out enough on the page.



Imagery The use of imagery on the site is good, but the overall effect is a little flatlooking. It could do with some more graphic design elements, applied with restraint, particularly around visually breaking up sections of the page into clearly defined content and navigation regions.



Content In general the content is kept short and concise, but there is some use of marketing hyperbole, which adds nothing to the information provided, and 2 simply annoys the modern web user. Elements of the content around the site are confusing and don’t seem to fit the headings. On the Bacon page for instance, there is information about Ducks and a link to a page where one can download an application. Leading statements on key pages like those below could be re-written to be more customer-centric: “Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet bresaola beef ribs chicken, corned beef shank pork chop turkey jowl short loin frankfurter jerky andouille ham pancetta pig. Andouille tenderloin corned beef jerky.” Whereas, on the Ham page, where one would expect to find information about a duck, the details about the duck are under a different heading, with no links provided to make it easy to order a duck.



SEO Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, is about making sure search engines can easily access and index the content on a website, so the website can be found by people searching the web. This is very much determined by the text readable on the site by indexing software, the good use of web-standard HTML, and a sensible site architecture that can easily be resolved by the search engine. Page titles HTML page titles are another important component for good SEO. These are in the top of the HTML code behind the scenes, but are used by Google to display search results and are what appears in the browser if someone bookmarks or marks a favourite for the site.



The Duck Soup site has good company-branded page titles, with a clear tagline. But they are the same on every page and would be improved by adding the name of the page in front of the tagline.



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G McGovern, Serving the customer, building the brand, 14 Oct 2013, gerrymcgovern.com



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Mobile review The demand to interact with a company through a mobile device is increasing daily. At Wired Internet we are finding many of our clients’ websites have grown from 5–10% mobile usage, to 15–20% or more in the last twelve months, depending on the industry. Although obviously many Duck Soup clients would be in an office and interact with the website on a desktop machine, we expect a great many rural and industrial-based clients would be interested in using a mobile device to perform regular tasks and interact with the company. For instance, Chicken Soup provides a mobile-optimised website for the customers that is clean and simple to use, and would not have cost a great deal to do. We suggest Duck Soup experiment with a mobile optimised site for ordering, location finding, and common contact details.



Competition review Looking at the competition on the web for the duck soup delivery market, it is clear most companies are behind other sectors when it comes to using the web for providing customer service. www.stuff.co.nz – contact by phone and email only www.trademe.co.nz – online ordering, login, mobile site = http://m.trademe.co.nz/



Recommendations and Next Steps Wired and Duck Soup meet to discuss this review, answer any questions, and plan next steps. Wired to prepare a proposal for a new site and navigation design, content review, and development of a mobile site including: o Implement and review site performance using Google Analytics. o Work with Duck Soup to identify and define the key target audiences for the site. o Mock-up a new design for the site, with an improved site architecture and navigation scheme, more focused typography and page layout, and emphasis on the common tasks performed by customers via the site while retaining a strong connection to the brand. o Review the content and work with the Duck Soup team to make changes required. o Build a mobile-optimised site for the provision of online ordering and other common customer tasks. o Improve the page titles for better SEO and book marking.



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Wired Internet Group, date 2013