After the assigned reading of Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think,” I reviewed a large eCommerce site and used his thoughts as a reference. I chose to examine barnesandnoble.com. On first entering the site, I noticed the design was clean and simple. The color palette was limited, which helps prevent the viewers from being distracted or overwhelmed. However, I do think their site was verging on being too simple and could be uninteresting to customers. From there I began to analyze the usability of the site. I searched for products by acting as two different customers, one who knew what they wanted and one who did not.
As the first, I found it very simple to use the search bar. The thinking was done for me because I only had to type a few letters before my product appeared. According to Krug, this is an important factor. I then placed that item in my shopping bag without much difficulty. My only issue was that once I hit the continue shopping button, it took me back to the main page. I find it tiresome to have to restart my search, especially if there were several items I needed in that area.
I then began my search as customer who did not know exactly what she wanted. I noticed that the product categories were not alphabetized or in any kind of order. This problem continued as I went farther into the site and was frowned upon by Krug. I believe this issue made my search more time consuming because I had to read through all the tabs. My first instinct was to look for a place that will recommend products to me. Instead of one area, I found many, including: B&N Top 100, NY Times Bestsellers, Trending Books, Best Books of the Month, Recommended, Best of 2012, Award Winners, Bestsellers by Subject, and Barnes & Noble Classics. Except for a few, small differences, these buttons seemed like nine ways to show the same items. After wasting a lot of time, I was able to find a product that I wanted.
I found the Barnes & Noble website to be decent place to search for products, but still could use some improvement. From the assigned reading, I remember Krug mentioned that customers should be able to tell right away whether or not a button is clickable. I did notice that while using the site, I would have to run my mouse over areas to see if it would light up or not. To make their site easier to use, they should make the buttons more obvious, decrease their amount of tabs and place the tabs in some kind of order. Overall, this review helped me to better understand how important it is for a website to have easy accessibility.