
Tested the usability of their website to identify and define future improvements.
Timeline
BCIT UX Group Project
1.5 Week Execution Time
Completed Jun 2019
Applied Skills
User Persona
Heuristic Evaluation
User Interviews
Usability Testing
Summary
Aritzia is a well-known women’s fashion brand known for developing its own in-house brands and having multiple styles that cover a wide range of occasions. The website was our choice for live usability testing as we believe in supporting local businesses.
On this project, I took on the roles of test moderator, usability heuristics, report creation, and quality assurance. Our team of 4 worked together to gather usability feedback on Aritzia’s desktop website and come up with potential improvements.
About Aritzia:
“Aritzia is an innovative design house and fashion boutique. We’re about individual style. We’re obsessed with quality. And we think shopping should be fun.”
Objectives
- Conduct a successful on-site website usability test.
- Document the testing process and present our findings with data.
- Find and propose effective solutions to identified user frustrations.
Inspiration
Passion for Fashion
My team’s fondness for their stylish selections was the reason for our collective choice in choosing Aritizia’s website. It was a great choice, as the teams’ enthusiasm was contagious, and we could offer insight for a successful local company – Vancouver represent!
Group Communication
We set up regular status reports in the form of daily meetings after our classes. We also created a WhatsApp group to stay connected.
Usability & Websites
Usability improvements in the form of stress-free, intuitive interactions would help Aritzia’s goal of encouraging customers to shop or browse through their online store.

Target Audience
Despite knowing that Aritzia has a very broad market appeal, during our brainstorm session we narrowed down to what we believed were their most common user groups:
- Women from 18-40, who would be more likely to purchase clothing.
- Working women, who need semi-professional wear.
- People looking to buy (female) clothing or accessories to gift.
We drafted out some traits that a regular Aritzia website user would have and utilized our findings to create a user persona:

Ideation
Usability Heuristics
Aritzia’s website heuristics were assessed using a UX usability checklist:

Two examples of the 9 total usability heuristics checked are shown below:


Tailored Questions
We customized our survey tasks for the online clothing industry.
- Our regular surveys were created with the use of Google Forms.
- Clicking tasks were created using UsabilityHub.
- Users would perform timed tasks on the Chrome browser.
We would encourage participants to follow the think-aloud protocol and narrate:
- What they thought was happening
- What they are currently doing
- Why they decided to take certain actions
Finding Participants
We left flyers hanging around our downtown school campus for a week with the allure of free coffee, donuts and snacks to draw in some fresh participants!

Implementation
Session Script
A script was used as an aid or reference tool between user interview sessions. Taking a periodic glance was a helpful reminder of what I should be covering at that moment.

Usability Testing Results
While a majority of users were content with the website design, not all participants were able to navigate through the tasks. Multiple users took over 30 seconds to complete a task we had set, with one not even managing to finish the task.
Judging from the data, we felt Aritzia’s website had a potential clash of visual hierarchy – users became stalled or confused differentiating between items.
Potential Improvements
Three potential solutions were offered for some recurring roadblocks:
- Allow users to select filters in multiple searching facets to streamline the experience.
- Have a single listing for a single product, with alternating image displays with multiple colours to indicate multi-colour availability.
- Add shipping information as a small element on the beginning of product listing pages / have shipping options as a clickable option on the miniature menu bars.
Creating our Report
Using Google Slides, Amy and I worked on the design. I focused on the layout and readability of the report, as well as the way our data was presented or interpreted.
Insights
Although we accomplished our objectives and the usability testing was a general success, there were some areas that we felt could be improved.
- A future usability test would be ideally done for desktop and mobile, especially as mobile user populations are becoming a majority.
- Rather than using plain-print flyers placed around our school campus – appealing flyers could have been placed in multiple locations to advertise our user interviews.
- Participants should have been encouraged to vocalize their thoughts and actions a bit more.