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Peer Review of Ruthie's Music
By Chris McFarlane
Contributing Writer
Article Date: 11.21.02
First Impressions
The site creates a welcoming environment with the soft colors, clean lines,
and nice use of white space. The eye is quickly drawn to the descriptive
text explaining what the user should expect from the site (quality music and
equipment).
First Task
Ruthie said it, “Check out these holiday deals.” I tried to check them out
by clicking on the elf or the associated text and nothing happened… as soon
as I did it, I said to myself, “Oh… these holiday deals. The ones right
here.” It sounds silly until you’ve watched someone look ashamed for doing
such a thing, but the act of clicking where you don’t need to makes people
feel uncomfortable. It’s like tripping on a crack in the sidewalk and
looking around to see if anyone was watching. There is no need of that when
it is easy to make it clear what you are talking about. Put an arrow to the
content or maybe have the little elf point at the collection of items on the
home page.
Continue Shopping
After adding an item to the cart, it is a nice touch to bring the visitor
back to the last major catalogue page they were visiting instead of the home
page or the item detail they came from.
View Privacy Policy
The link to view the privacy policy should appear at the top of the account
information page and at the bottom of the every page as part of the standard
footer. The link currently in the footer pops up a new window, but not the
same window as the “view privacy policy” link on the order information page.
Either popup the same content (without internal navigation) or eliminate the
popup window from the link in the footer and just display the information
the privacy policy as you have already done.
Data Entry Feedback
The onscreen feedback for data entry errors is great. Too many sites
overlook the chance to provide users with feedback that they can really use.
You can clean the messages up and get some brownie points with jumpy online
shoppers by changing the text to say something more like this,
“Data entry errors were found. Please review the following field(s) for
possible errors.”
Field 1
Field 2…
“If the information you provided is correct please call us at 555-555-5555
and we will personally place your order. Your satisfaction is our first
priority.”
Check Out Progress
Although the checkout process at Ruthies is fairly straight forward, I find
myself wondering how many more steps there are. It is pretty straight
forward to put a sequence of steps with a progress indicator of some sort at
the top of the screen to indicate how many steps the user has remaining.
Show them the light at the end of the tunnel.
Address Change
When the shipping address information is updated from the checkout page, you
can help your users by remembering what they’ve already typed in. Chances
are that the Ship To information will be similar to the billing address.
The form should auto populate the fields and save your users the effort of
retyping everything. You might also want to provide the “Ship To” and “Bill
To” forms on the new page so that users can verify both sets of information
at once.
Going Home
It sometimes seems silly, but the logo in the upper left needs to link back
to the home page. Everyone clicks there when they want to get back to the
beginning.
Make it easy for people to buy from you
·Digging for the “Add to Cart” Button makes it hard to buy. Buying should
be easy.
·Pull your “Add to Cart” button up beside the image of the item to be added.
The page that displays Hal Leonard Best Fake Book Ever is forever long and
the ever important buy me button is all the way down down down at the
bottom.
·Allow customers to get to a page with the buy button much earlier. One way
to do this is to take advantage of your screen real estate and put multiple
items on a single page. Any page that has an item’s price should also have
a “buy” button.
Search
Search needs to be a text box at the top of every page. Don’t put another
link in that long list on the left, put the search box up top by the
shopping cart page.
Empty Cart?
Why is my cart empty? It was full an hour ago before I sat down to dinner…
Now it’s empty and I have to go shopping again. I’m not sure if I did
something wrong or the system lost my information.
Well, that’s a quick brain dump of a few things that can and should be
updated. If I say anything more I’d have to bill someone… With that said,
the site looks pretty good overall (much better than most) and seems to have
an excellent inventory. If you get some good qualified traffic, you should
do fine once you clean up the interface a little.
About the Author:
Chris McFarlane
Expert InSite, Inc.
Usability & Accessibility Consultant
www.expertinsite.com |
