Tire E-Commerce

This project had two main parts:

• Conduct an audit of both existing sites and determine the largest problem areas of the site from UX and UI perspectives

• Recommend UX and UI improvements that will have the largest positive impact 

The first part of the project focused on determining how the sites were being used and how that usage would be reflected in analytics data, which would serve as an initial baseline.

The first step of the project was to determine what users/customers were using the site for - more specifically, we were looking to define what goals people have when using the Bridgestone or Firestone websites.

What I did

Since we were not able to directly ask users what they were trying to accomplish in a true-intent study, I had to use inductive logic to indirectly determine probable user intent. To do this I analyzed the information architecture of the site and the goals it appeared to be facilitating. 

Based on the site’s navigation, content, and functionality, I came up with 7 main intents (goals):

1. Educate & Research

2. Select Tires (Shopping)

3. Find a Store (Local)

4. Schedule an Appointment

5. Get Support

6. Discount & Rewards

7. Register Tires

To capture these intentions (goals), I chose a wireflow format since it captured all the information we needed and could be made (converted) quickly. The team started calling these visual representations of use cases “Intent Cases” (a mix of the words “intention” and “use cases”) These Intent cases did not capture an exhaustive list of all possible paths a user could take. Rather, they captured the most common or likely path(s) to accomplish a goal. These primary paths through a system focus attention on key elements that make up a user’s experience on each site.

What I did

Those wireflow “Intent Cases” were used as data inputs to measure usage and conversion rates (behavioral signatures), as determined in the Adobe Analytics tracking system, resulting in a data-driven perspective on how users actually used each website.   

How I collaborated

I guided the Data and Analytics Team through the branching paths in each “Intent Case” verbally, and they would translate the journeys into a query that would search user activity that adhered to the paths in each “Intent Case”. Groups of users who traversed the site in similar ways were considered the same user segment

For each user segment, the Data Team performed analysis to understand the user's behavior based on where traffic came from and where it goes throughout the website. This information would make it possible to determine how successful users were in achieving their goal. Users  that reached a page and took action at the last part of an “Intent Case” were considered successes, and those that dropped off, who didn’t complete a full “intent case” were considered failures.

What to evaluate

The project’s goals required that we evaluate both categories of usability and conversion. There were many possible things to evaluate, and we considered about a dozen listings of heuristics developed by various UX professionals. Where it made sense, we combined these lists, and eliminated any heuristics that weren’t pertinent to the project to develop a manageable set of criteria. We broke each usability and conversion down into five elements: 

• Usability of the Experience: Ease of Use, Usefulness, Structure, Discoverability, Refined for Mobile

• Optimization for Conversion: Increasing Focus, Clarifying Understanding, Expediting Outcomes, Driving Decisions, Enhanced Experience

Deciding how to conduct a benchmarking evaluation

We did not have the time or budget for traditional usability testing, and the elements in the optimization category would be difficult to objectively rate, so I considered ways to efficiently and to the best of our ability, effectively evaluate these websites given our constraints.

I considered conducting a heuristic evaluation since it would be fast and would capture many glaring issues, but I was concerned about missing problems and the bias I would bring if I was the only one doing the evaluations. I’d need to find a method that was more thorough and less biased. I determined that the best usability inspection method would be the “Pragmatic Usability Rating by Experts” method, also known as PURE. The pure method is fast, simple, thorough, and encourages the collaboration of multiple researchers to arrive at an average score.

How I did it

The stakeholders approved this approach, and we hired one additional contractor to help with this scoring. I had already set up the Heuristics analysis framework, and all I would need to do is explain our process

1. Review the heuristics analysis ratings and definitions 

2. Follow the flows in each “Intent Case” 

3. Rate each part of the experience, taking qualitative notes on things we observed that warranted the rating

4. Calculating the mean (average) of our combined scores

Discussing the final score, tweaking it slightly if one of us had a compelling argument based on criteria the other had overlooked.

To provide specific tactical recommendations for improvements, I revisited the Bridgestone and Firestone websites, following the “intent case” paths once again. Pretending I was the user, I would try to complete the goal of each case and take screenshots and notes of each element that negatively affected my ability to use the site or make a purchase.