Craft Beer Club Evaluation and Improvements
EVALUATION TECHNIQUES
DECIDE Framework is used as guidelines for guiding evaluation activities.
- Determine the goals
- Explore the questions
- Choose the evaluation approach and methods
- Identify the practical issues
- Decide how to deal with the ethical issues
- Evaluate, analyze, interpret and present the data
Determine the goal
Goal: Having a website that that encompasses: accessibility, consistency, intuitiveness, and simplicity.
Explore the Questions
Accessibility: Can ‘everyone’ use it?
A product’s accessibility is the degree to which it is available and usable by people. For this site in particular, this is a huge sticking point because only people who are 21+ can use the site.
Consistency: Do all elements of the site match?
It is important that design colors, spacings, fonts and alignments are consistent throughout the site. The site should reuse existing and learned UI patterns in the DOM whenever possible. Forms should have consistent alerts, labels, validation, and action behaviors. Navigation should be consistent and predictable. A dependable website has to be consistent for a user every time. This builds trust and assurance between the user and the site’s functionality.
Intuitiveness: Is it easy to learn?
Intuitiveness is about on how “learnable” a feature is. In this case, the website is the subscription model. You have to explain to the user that this is a service you sign up for for months at a time. You don’t have to pound it into the user’s head and go on and on about how it works because this model is now out in the market and has been for awhile. Keeping this learning as simple as possible is key, so that the user can understand the model without too many obstacles. Affordance is a key aspect of intuitive design. Like the color of links or the shape of buttons– these content blocks give clues to the user about what the model is.
Simplicity: Does it make life easier?
Can you convince the use that it is easier, cheaper, and more fun to order a subscription box than going to the store and being limited on the beer selection? Can you make it easy for the user to choose when/where they can ship their box to? Having three options for the user to choose from makes the user feel in control. Drinking a good quality beer should not be hard to do.
Choose the evaluation approach and methods
The method for evaluating and measuring the results will be a questionnaire. Users will be prompted to interact with the CBC prototype as if it were a real website. They will be asked to go through the site and buy a subscription box. After they have completed a purchase, they will be asked a hand full of questions, using Google Forms, about how their experience was.
Identify the practical issues
The users will fit with this the demographic and target audience. I will be conducting the test on my wife and a few of my close friends. The equipment will be a single Mac laptop and the test will be conducted in a home environment. The budget will be nothing. My wife and friends have volunteered their own time for free, and no other budget is needed. The test and the questionnaire should only time a few minutes to completed.
Decide how to deal with the ethical issues
Participants will be told what the goal of the study will be to improve overall site performance and that the findings will be logged on a Google Sheet once their Google Form is submitted. It will then be analyzed and evaluated by me. Privacy will not be an issue since their name and personal information will not be needed for the study.
Evaluate, analyze, interpret and present the data
They study could always be replicated. Next time it would be better with a bigger audience, and people that are not associated with the tester. The questionnaire will measure exactly what needs to be tested and will have a valid result. The process might have a slight bias because the users being tested are familiar with the tester, but this should not affect the data. The environment where the test is being held should make the user more comfortable than a lab would. Having a more comfortable and homey feel will make the user more relaxed and calm.
Since Google does such a nice job organizing the data, the findings will be straightforward for analyzing and making a recommendation for what needs to be changed.
Click here for the form if you’d like to check it out.
IMPROVEMENTS FROM EVALUATION
Evaluating the Data
Now that the study has been completed, we can scrape over it with a fine tooth comb. We can analyze the results we received from the questionnaire that was sent out to the test users. By using Google forms, the data is already organized into pie charts showing which answers rated highest for each question.
Most of the findings are what was predicted, but a few were a bit surprising. I’m only going to focus efforts on those findings and make changes, if necessary, to the design.
What factors would help you decide to trust and eventually buy a box from the Craft Beer Club
The first response that I thought was interesting was that people like to see customer photos compared to every other trust factor. Also interesting is that people really don’t care for reviews which is great because they were not put into the design.
What I can do to elevate the customer photos is move that section higher up on the home page and push down the testimonials.
Supportive Evidence:
Why testimonials work
Testimonials are mostly said to work on the basis of social proof. Social proof is a psychological process, which causes people to copy the behavior of others, in an attempt to reflect correct behavior. A well-known person, or at least someone people can identify with, may use a product or service and be blown away by it. When others hear about this, they will interpret that as correct behavior and follow suit. This is the reason influencer marketing is such an effective way to sell your product nowadays. When a celebrity on Instagram uses a product and writes positively about that, people will buy it.
Would you trust this website to adequately prep, package, ship, and deliver alcohol to you?
A four out of five is great; four being they trust the website, but not totally. Not you may never be able to fully trust an e-commerce website, but what I think might help would be repeating the positive experience (returning customer), which builds more trust, and will eventually bring brand loyalty.
I would not only give a user a discount code after they purchased something, but would start an email campaign nurturing them into another sale with special deals and discount promotions.
Supportive Evidence:
https://optinmonster.com/promotional-email-examples-and-how-to-write-your-own/
Emails That Offer Readers Something of Value
Here are a few things you can do to your promotional emails to make them more valuable for your reader:
- Don’t simply try to sell; instead, share free content you’ve produced
- Explain how your content will benefit your reader by solving a need
- Offer your reader valuable coupons or discounts
Who would you buy a beer subscription box for?
I found the result to this question interesting. People coming to this site aren’t just shopping for themselves, but possibly for a friend and/or family member. I will have to go back into the design and make sure that not only the content reflects that change, but the CTAs, and shopping cart elements have that option as well.
Supportive Evidence:
https://www.bigcommerce.com/ecommerce-answers/what-are-gift-sales/
What are gift sales?
Gift sales are the purchases a shopper makes with the intention of giving them to another person. During the Christmas shopping season-when retail in the United States has topped $449 billion-gift giving accounts for a staggering slice of sales (1). But it’s not just December that sees the bottom-line difference-gift sales can buoy your business during the entire calendar year.
How was it to navigate the site?
I have a strong suspicion that the reason this scored a four out of five is because it just a prototype and people got confused because not everything is clickable– it’s not a fully build out website even though it looks like it (this was explained to test users before starting the experiment). Another indication that this was the problem is that Evan had a comment at the end of the survey saying, “Make more pages available.”
Navigation is one of the key designs to a great website and therefore a great user experience. Without it, people will hesitate to come back to a website if they had a hard time navigating through it the first time.
Supportive Evidence:
https://uxplanet.org/5-ui-patterns-navigation-that-makes-good-ux-sense-92a65df7485d
Navigation That Makes Good UX Sense
Accessible navigation guides users through the flow of information in the UI and helps them complete their tasks, boosting your UX and driving up your web/mobile conversion. Likewise, if a user can’t find their way around your site or app, that site/ app is useless to them — poor navigation design makes for poor UX and causes users to drop off the conversion funnel. It’s no surprise then that poorly designed/ neglected UI navigation can have a disastrous impact on your bottom line.
Are you confident Craft Beer Club will be able to deliver your box with ease?
07 Again, a four out of five is great, but we can do better. I want to give a third option for users to choose from when they are selecting a delivery option. A work and home option is necessary, but a third option to pickup from the delivery store, like UPS, is a game changer, and sets the other two options apart from this one. Now users can pick up their box at their convenience.
Supportive Evidence:
https://www.ups.com/us/en/help-center/packaging-and-supplies/special-care-shipments/wine.page
Hold for Pickup
Approved wine shippers may use the UPS Hold for Pickup (HFPU) service for consumers who would prefer to pickup their wine shipments from a UPS Customer Center location. When picking up the package, the recipient is required to present a government-issued photo ID, such as driver’s license, passport, military ID, permanent resident card, or alien registration card to verify that the recipient is 21 years of age or older. If the recipient fails or refuses to present proper identification (or is not 21 years of age or older), the wine shipment is considered undeliverable and returned to the shipper.
