If you’re an avid online shopper at one of the UK’s top supermarkets, Asda, you may have something in common with one of Effect’s Account Managers, Sam Fox: you’re absolutely fuming with their new grocery order interface.
Two weeks ago, Asda migrated from a sub-domain to a sub-directory - a feat that was no doubt hugely complex - and gave the interface a major facelift in the process. Sistrex recently wrote a great article that covers the massive impact this has had on their search visibility (spoiler: it is currently 12% down on visibility and has given up over 20 VI points to competitors), but what is the impact of these changes on existing, loyal customers?
I sat down with the aforementioned Account Manager and devoted Asda shopper, Sam Fox, to learn more. She raised two key failures:
The search functionality no longer works effectively, meaning you just can’t find certain items.
The changes in the user journey for regular customers have made it difficult to order your recurring slot, and you can no longer add a prepopulated shopping list to your basket.
This has resulted in customers not being able to do the two key functions of the site: find the food they want, add it to the basket, and secure a regular delivery slot. So, like, the whole point. But they do now have a lovely little animated shopping basket whilst your payment goes through! Says Sam, ever the optimist! All that got me thinking…we design brilliantly effective interfaces, often geared towards conversion, for many of our partners, including Way of Life, London City Airport, Panache Lingerie, Scott Bader, and more. What ‘brilliant basics’ do our UX & UI design experts, Sanjay and Paul, always implement when they approach a new project? And will utilising these allow us all to avoid a similar misstep?
Lucky for me, they have two key guiding principles which form the basis of every project:
1. Navigation is the beating heart of your website. Everything – user experience, journeys, satisfaction, and much more - stems from it.
How users will use your site is largely up to how you allow them to. What journeys are customers likely to take through your site? What journeys do you want them to take? It’s imperative to keep those simple, straightforward, and easily navigable. So, as a completely hypothetical example, if you were a major grocery retailer redesigning your site, you should start that process from navigation and then work your way out from there. Your most important journey on the site may be for a user to book a delivery slot and populate a shopping basket. If so, keep those at the top of the hierarchy, intuitively placed so they are easily found by all customers. When we approach a new project, one of our first steps is to document a written sitemap to map out the navigation hierarchy, including pages and page types, content requirements, and other structural notes. In some cases, we run a tree test to sense-check if users will be able to easily find what they’re looking for. “What is a Tree Test?” I hear you cry! A tree test is a simple way to test a draft structure of the site. We’ll engage a test group representative of the different types of people that may engage with the website to user test the draft structure and navigation, asking our testers to find items in a stripped-back list of pages. We measure the success of our design based on the percentage of users who can successfully find the item, how directly they found it, and how long it took them to find it. Even if a high percentage of users are eventually successful in finding an item, if they aren’t able to find it directly or quickly enough, it flags those potential friction points early on, allowing us to ensure that our labels and hierarchy make sense before we move on to designing the full interface.
