As a member of the World Wide Creative team, I have finally been allowed to post on the Heavy Chef blog. Although I have been given strict guidelines and my comments will be closely monitored as I am told I can be very outspoken.
Within the World Wide Creative Team I help analyse clients websites from a usability perspective, and I am known for finding usability issues on all sites and being quite harsh in my remarks. So to prove the team wrong, for my first post I am going to share with you a site that I was testing the other week. I have to say this has been the only site I have ever looked at and found no problems.
The site is a villa rentals agency www.allurecollection.co.za specialising in luxury villas within South Africa.
One of my first tasks in starting a usability test is to answer the follow questions as if I was a new visitor to the site:
1. Have I come to the right site?
2. What do I do now? Where do I go?
You have 5 seconds to answer these questions before a visitor will leave the site. I feel this is a little long, but they do say for women you must only allow 3 seconds. Within seconds on the above site I know this is a property site, and to start searching I should click on the properties link on the left or the search facility on the right. (We have found in various group usability tests that people search in different ways, and it is great that there are multiple ways on this site).
As I delve deeper into this site the more I love it I know where to go, the information is all visible and easy to find, and at any time I have options easily available to me to contact the company.
- Nicola (World Wide Creative)
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hi, Nicola, how’s life?
Here’s a few quick spots:
1. Do they sell properties, or is this just rental? (ie. am I in the right place?)
2. How do I know where to click? Links are in grey bold; headers / subheaders are also in grey bold.
3. If I land on a page for a single property (eg. http://www.allurecollection.co.za/properties_sub.php?id=58 ) how do I know where I am in the site? Where are the clues to tell me how levels there are in the hierarchy, etc?
4. Are these just cape town properties? I’m looking for a place elsewhere – will it be listed on this site? There are no quick clues.
I agree though – way better than the average! I look forward to reading more of your stuff.
daniel
Hi Nicola, Thanks for the post. I am glad you liked the site, and will definitely take Daniel’s comments into consideration.
We’re also in the process of redoing the icape.co.za site, and hopefully we can improve even further on this.
Francois