To find out what the visitors of the webshop of Harolds actually see when they look at the webshop, we performed three types of tests. These are the type of tests that can be found in psychological literature, namely ‘change blindness’, ‘visual search’ and ‘eye-tracking’.
In this post we will take you through the method and results of the "visual search" test.
Goal
The test will be used to see how much time a participant needs to find an icon on the website.
Some queries have a “standard” and logical location on a website, like the shopping-cart and search icon. Other things on the site should be very notable, but maybe do not fulfill their goal. If it does or does not reach its goal can be devised from the outcomes of this test.
Method
The software for this test (a Processing-program) was provided by the course. We tested two pages, the home page and a product page, each with six queries. So there are in total twelve queries, parts of the website, which the participants of our test have to find. These queries are marked with a pink border in the images below.
In this post we will take you through the method and results of the "visual search" test.
Goal
The test will be used to see how much time a participant needs to find an icon on the website.
Some queries have a “standard” and logical location on a website, like the shopping-cart and search icon. Other things on the site should be very notable, but maybe do not fulfill their goal. If it does or does not reach its goal can be devised from the outcomes of this test.
Method
The software for this test (a Processing-program) was provided by the course. We tested two pages, the home page and a product page, each with six queries. So there are in total twelve queries, parts of the website, which the participants of our test have to find. These queries are marked with a pink border in the images below.
The level of finding the queries varies from easy to hard. During the test, the query is shown on a black background until the participant presses the space bar. When the space bar is pressed the website is shown and the participant has to find the query on the website. If the participant finds the query, he can click on it and the next query on a black background is shown.
Results
The software program measures the time (in milliseconds) that each participant needs to find a specific query. In order to get conclusions from the test the test results will be summarized in some tables. In this table the time to find each query is shown per participant.
The tables below shows the results of the Visual Search test. Per query the average time is shown.
Results
The software program measures the time (in milliseconds) that each participant needs to find a specific query. In order to get conclusions from the test the test results will be summarized in some tables. In this table the time to find each query is shown per participant.
The tables below shows the results of the Visual Search test. Per query the average time is shown.
To get a better overview of the results a gradient in the results was made. The tables below show the scaled results of the Visual Search test. A 1 means that the particular query is found fastest by the participant a 6 means slowest.
Discussion
For the home page
The ‘vergrootglas’ was easiest to find for participants, ‘elektrische gum’ was the hardest query to find. What catches the eye is that the small ‘Harolds’ and the ‘urban art’ were not found very fast by participants, although these aspects are relatively important. (As shown in the wordcloud of desired ranking a few posts back). This means we will pay extra attention to the visibility of 'Harolds' and 'urban art' in the redesign.
For the Promarker product page
The word "BTW" has by far the lowest average time a participant takes. This can be due to the placing in the middle of the page next to a big empty space. However, this is not a very important feature on the side. The slogan of harolds took the longest time to find, but this is a less important aspect in the product page. Therefore, we will not focus on the slogan of Harolds in the redesign of the product page.
With the visual search test, we focussed on different queries than in the change blindness test. Therefore, this test helped us to gather new information, next to the information we already obtained in the change blindness test. Eventually, the results of the visual search test, in combination with the results of the change blindness test and eye tracking test, will be used to set up a list of requirements for the functional and aesthetic redesign.
For the home page
The ‘vergrootglas’ was easiest to find for participants, ‘elektrische gum’ was the hardest query to find. What catches the eye is that the small ‘Harolds’ and the ‘urban art’ were not found very fast by participants, although these aspects are relatively important. (As shown in the wordcloud of desired ranking a few posts back). This means we will pay extra attention to the visibility of 'Harolds' and 'urban art' in the redesign.
For the Promarker product page
The word "BTW" has by far the lowest average time a participant takes. This can be due to the placing in the middle of the page next to a big empty space. However, this is not a very important feature on the side. The slogan of harolds took the longest time to find, but this is a less important aspect in the product page. Therefore, we will not focus on the slogan of Harolds in the redesign of the product page.
With the visual search test, we focussed on different queries than in the change blindness test. Therefore, this test helped us to gather new information, next to the information we already obtained in the change blindness test. Eventually, the results of the visual search test, in combination with the results of the change blindness test and eye tracking test, will be used to set up a list of requirements for the functional and aesthetic redesign.