Evaluation Tool And Analysis For Assessing Fashion Retail Websites

Part 1. Using relevant readings and research, compile your own unique and useful evaluative tool for assessing fashion retail websites strategy and effectiveness. This tool must be strategically sound and supported by research evidence but ultimately your own work.

Part 2 – Using your unique tool that you developed put it into practice by assessing 2 Fashion Retail Websites and then write a summary of your findings and recommendations for these websites.

1: Website Evaluation Tool Analysis

2: Evaluation of 2 Fashion Retail Websites

A. Evaluation Tool Analysis

In the present business scenario of business rivalry in the online fashion industry for acquiring new customers and retaining the existing customers has turned into a noteworthy business issue in the online fashion industry. With the development of new technologies, the Internet offers new potential outcomes for customer management through the administration of customer relationships (Díaz, Rusu and Collazos 2017).   Therefore, in order to be a successful online e-commerce site, a web site to meet some of the following criteria’s such as usability such as the UI design of the web pages on the website, used technology used for the organization, search engine optimization and the use of relevant content on the pages of the site.

 The following report contributes to the evaluation of the two website which are hsystudio.com and museluxe.com.  The paper consist of discussion about the website evaluation tool and the evaluation of the above mentioned sites using the tools. In addition to that, the paper also includes recommendations for improving the performance of the sites.         

For assessing any website we need to develop some criteria’s that will be used as the base line for the assessing a website. For this scenario, we have used the following bench marks,

User task analysis on the pages, content readability, navigability between the pages, accessibility, User interaction and experience, error testing on the pages.

In this sections we will analyse how the above tools can help in the successful assessment of the given sites.

In assessing a website the most evident and vital issue to test is whether the users or the viewers of the .web site can fulfil their tasks or collect the information and objectives when they go to the sites. Not just that,  the business owners need to guarantee that  the pages or the website are developed and designed in such a way that  helps the  uses  in the best and most proficient way imaginable by them.

For this the main aspects are discussed below,

Intuitiveness of the site: This aspect is about how easily the users can complete their tasks or collection of information from the website.

Efficiency:  This aspect is about determining how optimally the users are performing their tasks on the site (Díaz, Rusu and Collazos 2017). If there are ways that are implemented in order to streamline and reduce the time it takes to complete a specific task.

Learnability:   This aspect measure the ease of use of the web pages and the web page controls by a completely new users.

Content on the pages are considered as the heart for any web site and for the fashion website it is important to efficiently place and use the content on the web pages.  

Ease of Comprehension of the content:   In order to attract the users it is important that the content on the page are easy to comprehend (Nugroho and Santosa 2015). The words being used in the pages must be familiar to the middling Internet user rather than being uncommon and too complex to understand by a simple user. In addition to that, paragraphs and sentences needs to be as concise as possible.

A.1. Website Evaluation Tool Analysis

Proper use of typography: The used fonts on the pages should be used with a proper size so that it is easily readable for the users as well as the contrast between the background of the page and the colour of the fonts on the pages.

 It is important for the site it is important to make it accessible for all the users even by the people with disability.  

For the fashion e-commerce sites it is important to ensure that, users are able to easily navigate between different pages of the site. For easy navigation the following components are important.

Efficient information architecture:  The webpages on the site needs to be well organized and categorized (Díaz, Rusu and Collazos 2017).  In addition to that it is important to the navigational features needs to be well constructed on all the pages of the site.

Efficiency of Navigational controls:  This is about the how easily and fast as well as in how many actions such ass number of clicks the users can to get to required page or the page of interest.

Findability of the control features: It is important to  ensure that there sufficient site features such as archive pages,  internal links, search boxes  and  other navigation features that aid in finding relevant webpages are present on all the pages.

Cross platform compatibility:  It is important for the site that it should efficiently work or operate on as many browsers as possible used by the users.  For this the site needs to be responsive, the layout of the page should be flexible depending on the way the user device to view it.  

Use of HTML Accessibility Features: For the web pages it is important to use   HTML features and techniques that aid users with visual impairments to interact with the pages(Díaz, Rusu and Collazos 2017). Thus it is important to include these features and techniques to attract this users  

For both the website, we found that the user’s needs more than 3 clicks are to search for a product and to complete a stage as well as to go further on the web site. Even for checking out with the purchased product requires minimum 3 clicks. When the customer is on the purchasing page, they should go all the way back to the product page in order to change the product when they do not like it as that involves a lot of effort and time consuming for customers it make the users or the customers frustrated.              

For this report we have chosen the sites, hsystudio.com and museluxe.com. The following section of this report consist of the evaluation of the above motioned two sites. It is crucial for the websites to present and convey the essential administration gave by the site or the central thing being sold by the site. When this has been set up, advance refinements of inquiries regarding the website can be tended to and distracting things on the site can be recognized, (for example, auto rentals on a carrier webpage). Further, as expressed by Nugroho and Santosa (2015), the visual outline should coordinate the site's motivation or the business it want to develop. As such, each site gathering ought to have its related arrangement of measurements and a standard, typical format for its landing page. Legitimacy is one of the issues that will be tended to here, because of the need of purchasers seeing a site as substantial for their requirements. This includes deciding whether the site obviously expresses its motivation and encourages exchanges of the expressed reason on the landing page. On the off chance that the webpage does not address the clients essential needs (as reflected free, expressed reason for the site in a stylishly satisfying way), the client will go somewhere else to have their necessities met. For instance, consider a carrier site and that it is normal to have its flight seek instrument noticeably showed on its home page.

A.2. Evaluation of 2 Fashion Retail Websites

 In our assessment for this site (museluxe.com), we found that none of the pages of this site is utilizing any perceived analytics tools. It is as yet conceivable to assemble a lot of data about the user behaviours from webserver logs. However entire user behaviour analysis requires customer side Javascript on the pages of the site that are not present on the pages of the site.

4 pages of this site are not compatible with the W3C standard. Since there exist numerous errors in the coding part of the pages some web browser will be unable to peruse this site accurately and it may not generally show effectively to the intended users which consequentially affect the accessibility to the site by the users.

3 of the pages of this site return page content with or without a trailing slash on their URLs. Web indexes may see these as independent pages with copied content which they would not show in their search results leading to the lack of findability of the users to the required information (Nugroho and Santosa 2015).  This consequently leads to the issues related to the navigability between the different pages of the site.  

Numerous headings (7.0%) were observed to be vacant on the different pages, or erroneously characterized. Unfilled or invalid headings are of no use to the web crawlers and make a site less accessible (Díaz, Rusu and Collazos 2017). In addition to that, this in turn leads to the hindrance in the readability of the content on the pages.   

A few pages did not characterize headings effectively. The H1 tag ought to be utilized for the highest level heading, with H2 being utilized for sub-headings and H3 for additionally sub-headings et cetera. Not complying with this tradition may befuddle users.

Different pages of this site, consist of 12 links that does not contain any text describing their destination on the site.  All the Links on the pages of this site should describe their destination properly in order to benefit both the users/readers and search engine crawlers to list the different pages of the site in their results.

In our assessment we also found that 95.0% of the images do not have defined size on the pages utilizing the height and width HTML attributes. Even though these attributes are considered as optional, but   they are strongly recommended by the designers as this tags help the browser arrange the page faster while reducing the load time.   

Few headings 2.0% on the different pages of the site were observed to be empty same as the above site or is inaccurately defined by the designers of the pages. Void or invalid headings does not help the search engines and makes the site to be in the lower of the search results of the search engine results affecting the accessibility to the site adversely.

All the web pages on the web site include at least more or less metadata. On the contrary only 80.0% of the web pages of hsystudio.com have a description Meta tag in their pages (Nugroho and Santosa 2015). Description Meta data is crucial as it acts as factor to influence the search engine (Such as Google) results search result pages.

 On the contrary of museluxe.com, this website was delivered with GZIP encoding to the users. This technique is considered as good practice as it reduces the loading time of a web page on the web browsers. Leading to the increased accessibility by the users of the site.  

 In addition to that every page in hsystudio.com uses some kind of analytics tool or   software in order to track the user behaviour (Díaz, Rusu and Collazos 2017). This is considered as excellent development practice that allows the administrators for analysis of the different segment of user behaviour while visiting the site.

Use of the web analytics: For this web site we found that none of the pages uses any kind of web analytics tools.  It can help in collection, measurement, analysis and reporting of Internet related data in order to understand and optimize Web usage by the users.

The web analytics tools can consequently retrieve the statistics about usage details of a site helping the site in finding route designs relating to high Web use or to the early leaving of a page of a website.

The main two strategies for the collection of the usage data are analysis of server-based log files that collects user activity information is tithe log records by the used Web servers. Another is customer/user based page-tagging requiring the addition of JavaScripts to the webpages of the site to collect data about the user’s session on the web page. There are mainly two Web analytics tools are used by the web pages are Alexa and the Google analytics tools. Google analytics offers code that must be embedded into each Web page on the web site to be followed and to collect data from.  Results from this tools visualizes the different types of  information related to the users  such as  thee geographic location of the users, the  pages they visited on the site, to what extent they remained on each page, how profound into the site or the web pages they explored to find out their desired information.

Use of GZIP encoding for the web pages:  The pages of this site is not served with GZIP encoding techniques thus leading to the increased load time for the website in case the users have slow internet connection.  Use of the GZIP compression for the web pages is supported widely by different devices and significantly reduces the loading time for a web pages of a website.

Tablet optimized viewing:   Even though all the pages are developed and managed using media specific queries on the mobile devices but only some pages are optimized to provide consistent view on the tablet devices. Thus it is suggested to use tablet-only styling using media queries in the used CSS files for the pages.

Use of the height and width attributes:   As the pages of this site does not contain images with defined height and width tag, it leads to the longer load time for the webpages as the pages of the website repeatedly rendered and repainted with the downloaded data. Use of the specific width and height tag will help the browsers to leave a specific space on the page to render the image later and load the other parts of the page in short amount of time (Nugroho and Santosa 2015). This also helps in the preventing the stretching of the images on the browser that leads to the in-appropriate visualization of the content on the web pages. Use of the tags are also helpful in improving the readability of the content on the different pages of this website by specifying the area of the images and text content on the web pages.

Use of the logo of the different security standards for user data protection:  The home page of this site does not contain any images or certifications for securing the digital and financial transactions on the web so that users feel safe while purchasing the products from the site. Thus it is suggested to use the digital SSL certifications from VeriZon, Maestro PayPal etc.  This will encourage the users to share their personal as well as financial data like the credit/Debit card details, passwords, Name etc., in order to purchase products and order products.     

 It is important for the website to resolve the validation errors on the different sites in order to improve the accessibility by the users (acquiring new users and retaining the users). These validation errors prevents the website from being fully W3C compliant for which different web browsers may not load the pages correctly which adversely impacts in  the users readability of the content on the pages.   

 The web site should encourage their users to share the content of the pages using the social media buttons on articles and pages of website. The social media buttons should be highlighted properly so that it can attract the user’s attention to the buttons. The extent of social activity of the users of a website depends very much on its target audience, type of the website, and how much the users interact the website.

The home page of the site does not contain any search box that reduces the navigational aspects of the website and the users may have to put more effort to find out a specific information on the website.

As some of the pages have content less headings, thus it needs to be ensured that all the headings consist of relevant content under the specific headings (Nugroho and Santosa 2015). This will improve the readability of navigability on the different pages of the site.    

 In order to make the site more accessible, it is important to use height and width HTML attributes for all the image tags on all the pages. The attributes must have the same value as the source image dimensions. If it is not desired to resize an image on the web browser it is suggested to use CSS.    

Conclusion

Inefficient and inadequate implementation of the usability features in the online fashion stores can result into high dropout rate of the customers, the expansion in costs for the maintenance of the site and at the end the low transformation of the website visitor’s rate on the site. A few elements and attributes, such as insufficient site navigation, the  of finding the shopping cart, lack of the detailed data about the products on the pages , a long and befuddling checkout process, also, few or just picture of the products  shows ease of use issues in online business site. The nature of this kind of site can be impressively enhanced when ease of use is coordinated into the advancement procedure of internet business websites.

 Thus improving the sites as per the given recommendation in the above sections of this report can help both the web sites to improve their performance on the online platform.  As the recommendations will help the users to easily use the pages, navigate between the pages, see the products, easily buy them and have a secure environment to share the financial and personal data on the website.      

References

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