In the day and age of our generation, we live on the internet. From Social networking to education, the average person spends 13 hours a week on the internet and spend about an hour of that shopping. With this statistic, web creators use this to help create and navigate their online shopping websites, but just how easy are they to use?

For this assignment, I visited urbanOG.com to shop for a pair of military style boots. When I typed into the browser the website, the home page popped up with all it’s pictures and tags. At the top of the page, there are several tags labeled for each category the website sells varying from shoes to costume. When I scrolled over the show tag, a drop down section appeared showing all the different categories of shoes. After clicking on the section that I wanted to search for the boots for, it sent me straight to the shoes I wanted. Now this wasn’t the only way to search for shes on this site.

After navigating my way to the desired section I wanted, I asked myself if there was an easier way. I decided to go back to the home page and look for the search engine for the site. after spending a few minutes looking over the home page, I finally found it and typed in what I was looking for. I originally typed in “military boots” but the search came up blank so instead I typed in military and the boots I was looking for showed up. Once I found them, you had two choices, either click the quick view bottom, which popped up when you scrolled over the shoe, or to click on the picture itself. Either way, after clicking on it, adding it to the shopping cart was the same for both. This was easy to do after selecting the color and size that was desired. Once added to the cart, a notification popped up telling you that it was added to the cart. After words you could either continue shopping or check out.

Using the search bar to navigate through the site was a lot easier to, but trying to find it was a challenge in itself. When designing this website, the creators did a poor job locating the search bar and the style they created it in. Also, when looking for the shoes the pages were marked and clearly seen for how many pages of shoes they had, but once you got to the bottom of the page when you though you were done, another section would pop up instead of a new page, and the page numbers would stay the same. This design element was interesting and a great use of space but as a shopper, it can get annoying thinking that you only have so many pages but instead there are several sections within each page. The designer should have just made each page full, without reloading multiple times, so navigation and understanding of the page could be more useful to the shopper.

The use of the shopping cart was interesting and innovative. When you adding something into your shopping cart, a note would pop up telling you and showing you what you added and this was something I had never seen before. The drop down areas for the tags was also a great use of space. Having the sections underneath and popping up when you scrolled over them instead of clicking them was nice because you never had to change what page you were on if you wanted to see what other categories and sections they had.

Overall, the website was easy to use and very inventive in it’s use of space. The search bar and the sections in each page became an annoyance and could be improved on,  but overall the website was easy to use and very inventive in it’s use of space. The layout and use of pictures of products we also nice additives to help make the website not only aesthetically appealing but easy to navigate.