I decided to take a look at newegg.com for my monthly review. While I didn’t have too much trouble finding an item that satisfied my needs, I definitely think the usability could make some marked improvements but following the principles summarized in pg 10-29 of Dont Make Me Think! 

For my item, i decided to look into buying a graphics card for a gaming PC. A few of my requirements were that it had to be Intel based, power some where in the middle to upper range, and at least 2GB of dedicated memory. Upon going to the newegg.com home page I was surprised at how many navigation elements were present and couldn’t help but feel that much of it could be consolidated or reorganized. Shopping is mainly governed by one tiered nav bar on the left side of the page. It lists categories with menus that fan out to make more specialized choices. These fanned out menus, in turn, have their own headers. This section in itself isn’t too difficult to use when you realize the shear quantity of product categories Newegg offers. That being said, I think some improvements could be made. For example, the fanned menus have a set height and display choices one after another in vertical columns with each new category heading being displayed directly after the last item in the previous category. These means that category headings are displayed randomly inside the menu as opposed to at the top of each column where they might be easier to recognize. Also, some of the fanned menus seem to use bold blue headings with gray subheadings and some seem to use just the bold blue or the gray. This leads to more confusion in regards to navigation hierarchy. Beyond this main bar, there are several more navigation blocks on the home page. There is a small horizontal one centered at the top that seems to be vaguely purposed towards user tasks. It lists “My Account” and “My Newegg” which do seem related if not rather redundant. Latest Email Deals and Gift Cards are also lumped into this bar. At the very top of the page is the shopping card and “login/register” links. I think this link’s existence conflicts with the last bar I talked about. Clicking “Login” takes you to the same exact page as clicking “My Account” does when you aren’t logged in. Why include both of these links when they are likely to confuse the users’ eyes?

Since I didn’t have a specific product in mind for my search, I decided to use the left nav bar to find a suitable item. Under Computer Hardware, and then under the Computer Components subheading I saw “Video Cards and Video Devices.” This seemed like the logical place for graphics/video cards so I clicked there and, sure enough, was brought to the right page. On this new page my eye immediately went to the left because that was were the previous navigation had been. Although the new menu had different styling, it was what I needed. I looked past the bitcoin mining promotion and featured products on the page itself and clicked “Desktop Graphic Cards” on the left nav. Finally now on the left side of the screen I had a huge list of options for narrowing down my search. The very first one being the name of GPU itself. I ran into a moment of hesitation here because all of the ones listed before clicking the expand button were Radeon (AMD) whereas I wasted GeForce (Intel). Because I couldn’t see any GeForce before clicking the expand, it made me wonder for a second where the Intel GPU’s  were listed. There was, however, a Chipet Manufacturer option lower down that allowed me to select NVIDIA (Intel) to narrow down my search without selecting a specific GPU. From there it was easy to specify the kind of card I was looking for. I used the option on the left nav to select an Intel Card with 2GB of memory for $200-$300. I settled one an MSI card after reading reviews and clicked add to cart.

The shopping cart experience was much more straightforward. After going through to view my cart, I noticed that it automatically added the free game I got with my card which I thought was a nice touch. From there it was simply a matter of adding my billing and shipping information, entering any promotional/coupon codes, and clicking confirm.

All in all, I think Newegg’s site will be usable enough for most people but suffers from bloating due to just how many products it offers. The navigation has the right elements, they just need to be organized further with more emphasis placed on where users’ eyes tend to go and how people look at navigation. I think even with their volume of products, the amount of top level navigation on the homepage could be greatly decreased.