Aritzia

Tested the usability of their website to identify and define future improvements.

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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.

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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:

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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!

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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.

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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.