Users who participated in our research for mydeco.com were asked to think about a room that they wanted to revamp where they normally relax. They were then asked to find a lighting item that they would like to buy from the website.
Users were immediately drawn to the large panel in the central section of the homepage. Some used this area as general navigation and missed the primary navigation at the top of the page. The effect of this was that these users missed some of the lighting products that were available to them, because this graphic was targeted to a certain type of product.
There was a mix of how users chose to navigate from the home page. There was a split between users clicking on to the main graphic, the primary navigation and the search box. When conducting a general search from the site search box, one user started typing in the search term ‘lights’. A drop down list of search suggestions appear in the search box but they were rather abstract for this particular user who chose ‘lights fantastic’ and was confused by the wording displayed to him.
Users did not play with the filters on the left hand side of the page. For lighting, users were more interested in the style of the item and were drawn to each product photograph to make their decision. Users looked at the brand names underneath the photographs and spent more time looking at the brands that they failed to recognise.
Once a user had found a product that they wanted to purchase they were re-directed to the retailer’s website. This was very slow for some users and they abandoned their journey. Users were shown a re-direction page that contained information regarding why they should shop with mydeco.com. Users stared at one bullet point that said ‘shop in your jimjams’. The actual word and the tone of the sentence was so different from what they were expecting to see that it caused users to look at it for longer than they might otherwise have done.