His Background

Pete is looking for some new curtains whilst renovating his house. He likes to buy from places that are local to him to help small businesses keep afloat, so he browses online for fabric shops in his area.

His Actions

He is browsing on his mobile because he does not own a computer. He finds a great looking website with some unique fabrics that he thinks would really suit his new interior design.

However, whilst he is browsing through the fabrics, he can’t find an option to filter his search in order to narrow down the results. After a few minutes of struggling, he finds the filter option at the bottom of the page, which he thinks is an odd placement. Once he finally gets to use the filter, he realises he can only choose one filter at a time and then has to refresh the page and go through the options one by one. Although he loves the designs, he grows frustrated and decides to look elsewhere, which is a site easier to navigate.

The Outcome

Pete likes the appeal of having something that you wouldn’t find in everybody’s home, so this site would have been great for him as a lot of their products are stand alone fabrics. 

Unfortunately, a badly built website is a key thing that affects overall sales and transactions. Even a website that works well but loads slowly will see 95% of visitors leaving within a few seconds.

This meant that despite the quality of their fabrics, the business lost an online sale.

The Resolution

By user testing, we found that when users were browsing on their desktop, they were utilising the filter options. It was only when users were on mobiles that they were missing the filter box, as on desktop it was placed at the side of the products but on mobile it shifted down to the bottom of the page. 

A quick resolution was to change the filter options so that it was a tab at the top of the product list for both desktop and mobile. That way the option would not be missed. 

Another improvement would be to add an ‘apply all changes’ button, so that multiple filters could be used at once without having to reload the page. That way, the user’s journey runs smoothly from start to finish and would make conversions more likely.