His Background

Stuart is looking for an experienced Gas Safe registered plumber to fix his boiler that has stopped working since this morning. He needs it fixed by tomorrow as he has his in-laws staying over for the weekend, so is looking for a business that does emergency callouts. He starts browsing online for a suitable business that can help him.

His Actions

Stuart finds a few businesses that have a number of positive reviews. He looks into one that is local to him and the first thing he sees is that they offer a guaranteed same day service, which is exactly what he needs.

He sees they have a booking form to get in touch with them, but he can’t find the link to get to it. He sees that they have a live chat service, so speaks to them to find out what to do next. The live chat service is clearly a bot and not a human interaction, as it does not give Stuart full responses and ends up repeating the same things. He grows frustrated with the business and decides to look elsewhere.

The Outcome

Stuart is colour blind and therefore finds it hard to differentiate between some colours. The button for the booking form was in fact on the homepage of the site, but was hard for him to notice when compared to the background colour of the page. It did not clearly stand out as a button and was therefore missed. 

This company would have been able to attend Stuart’s property within a few hours, but lost a sale due to unclear web design and misinformation in the copy regarding the chat bot. 

The Resolution

Did you know that there are roughly 320 million people worldwide with colour vision deficiency? When information is presented by colour alone, a person who is colour blind misses that information. Your website should be accessible to all users, so although your designs may look professional and pleasing to the eye, they may not actually be working for your users. 

This is where user research is vital, so you can find out information you may not have otherwise been aware of. 

The main resolution to this issue it to make all call to actions clearly visible against the backgrounds colour of the site, as without users will have no way of getting to the next step in their inquiry and conversions will be lower.