Competitor analysis
Researching the current landscape of competitors and understanding the good and not so good design patterns..
Evaluating the user experience
The Problem: Comscentre felt their dated website needed a re-design since the analytics seemed quite low in comparison to competitors, however, as the UX specialist, I felt it critical to communicate to stakeholders that a heuristics evaluation would highlight all the UX/UI pain points to enable us build a more delightful experience.
In preparation for the website re-design I put together a Heuristic evaluation document to start comparing all the main competing businesses ( their online presence ). The 10 Heuristics were developed by Jakob Nielson and simply put are a set of usability “rules of thumb” or best practices for user interface design.
The goal of the evaluation was to review and compare against five competitors, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and finally document how we can best leverage this knowledge to enhance the Comscentre website.
Heuristic Evaluation
Each competitor is marked out of 10 for each Heuristic with a final score given out of 100.
Once complete, i note down all the good and bad points regarding my experience – not as a specific customer but purely from a usability point view.
Affinity mapping
Although the initial sitemap was relatively small, it was still important to use the affinity mapping process to structure different areas of the website.
Information Architecture
I went through the entire site to establish the existing sitemap structure and create a diagram.
This is done clearly see what the hierarchy looks like. this will support Experience maps and user flows to convey the different journeys that users go through, when visiting the site.
Analytics
Using Google Analytics I was able to convey a clear diagram of the current user behaviour flow – from starting page to drop off.
This data aligns with the summary data to help understand what customers are experiencing before they decide to leave, valuable information to show stakeholders.
Although not part of the scoring criteria, some analytic research was included to convey an overview of:
Organic Keywords,Organic Traffic,
Ads Keywords,
Ads Traffic and
Ads cost
