Amperfan
Amperfan is a local store specializing in Korean pop music albums and related merchandise. As a fan of the genre and a regular customer of their physical shop, I chose this site due to my personal passion and potential to make an impact.
01
Executive Summary
Amperfan.io is a company that looks to provide e-commerce experience for Korean pop music & goods as a means to reach fans beyond their physical location. The goal was to uncover issues that are plaguing the different systems of Amperfan.io and rectify them. The test objectives for this test are as follows:
What is inhibiting the process of finding specific artists/albums on the site?
Are the prices and inventory reflected properly on the website to enable a pleasant purchasing experience?
Is the overall experience pleasant, and information easily attainable?
The major results uncovered that indeed, several areas are in need of improvement. During testing, we have encountered many issues aligning with our test objectives in where users had many gripes with finding items, lack of proper inventory display, and their overall experience with being able to find information.
We believe it is in the best interest of Amperfan, to remedy the issues brought to light with the following changes.
Providing more options for the user to navigate the shop with a drop down including several categories and sub-categories.
Properly displaying inventory when low or sold out, and providing warning if trying to purchase more than available.
Displaying the FAQ/Contact in a more visible area in addition to slight redesign of the pages themselves, to provide a better experience.
These changes are necessary to ensure that Amperfan is providing the best user experience it can to the customer, which in turn should increase satisfaction and retention. By addressing existing issues (backed by research and testing), Amperfan is proving to its customers that it looks to make strides in being the best it can be for them, and will take the extra step.
02
Methodology
The tests were performed remotely, moderated by us, and recruited through various channels of Kpop Fans.
Our test objectives were:
What is inhibiting the process of finding specific artists/albums on the site?
Are the prices and inventory reflected properly on the website to enable a pleasant purchasing experience?
Is the overall experience pleasant, and information easily attainable?
With these in mind, we recruited 5 participants for the testing and prepared a script. Through the test, we had them go through a pre-test questionnaire (demographic and general information), 3 different tasks, followed by a post-test questionnaire (relevant to the test itself and their thoughts). The specific tasks are as follows:
To look for and purchase and specific lightstick.
To look for and purchase a large quantity of a specific album/digipack.
To locate the FAQ/Contact to learn more about them.
The tasks were also given a scenario in which the user would need to perform this sort of task in a real life situation. This testing was performed using video call/sharing platforms such as zoom/discord, and their reactions, comments, and overall testing were recorded and analyzed post-test.
03
Results & Recommendations
The results from the testing proved our hypothesis on the issues to be correct. All 5 participants ran into issues and expressed discontent with the lack of navigational choices, complete omission of any limited inventory or sold out warning, and some issue with discovering more about Amperfan’s information.
In both tasks that required looking for a specific item, when attempting to interact with “shop” in the nav bar, it led them just to their overall full inventory, which as you can imagine was not great and led to some questioning and frustration.
When attempting to buy multiple quantities of an item, they were met with a default browser warning, stating they can’t do that. Which was frustrating in multiple ways such as:
Why wasn’t the fact there was lower stock displayed initially?
Why doesn’t it even allude to the specific amount left in stock both initially and via warning?
If trying to add it via the cart, and it goes over, then the cart just freezes and requires a refresh.
Lastly, while looking for more information, most assumed it would be under FAQ/Contact, but one of the users had an especially difficult time locating the information.
Problem: Lack of navigation options in the nav bar, as “shop” only lead them to an overall inventory page.
Recommendation: Providing more options for the user to navigate the shop with a drop down including several categories and sub-categories.
Problem: Improper display of inventory status leading to issues and unsatisfactory purchasing process.
Recommendation: Properly displaying inventory when low or sold out, and providing warning if trying to purchase more than available.
Problem: Finding the FAQ/Contact areas to learn more about Amperfan wasn’t always easy with some struggling to do so.
Recommendation: Displaying the FAQ/Contact in a more visible area in addition to slight redesign of the pages themselves, to provide a better experience.
04
Conclusion
In conclusion, to ensure that Amperfan can provide a great user experience to their customers, both the local and nationwide fans need to feel treated equally and are both given the great experience they deserve. So in order to achieve this amazing goal, we used the tools of user research to uncover any issues that needed to be addressed and improved upon.
By doing an initial heuristic evaluation, it provided the insight to draw up a survey to implement to the KPOP community. Taking the results of the survey, User Personas are created to encapsulate different areas of our target demographic. The User Personas allow us to more broadly understand the whole user base and giving them User Stories, we then are able to feel potential frustrations, needs, uses of someone in their shoes. This leads to drafting a script for testing, recruiting participants, and getting realworld feedback on exactly how members of the KPOP community would actually interact with these areas and if the problem areas are really that problematic, either proving or disproving our initial thoughts. Which in our case proved them to be true, therefore recommendations and prototypes were drafted to remedy these issues, and ensure a more positive user experience for the customer.
Future or Additional Testing would be to recruit participants through the prototypes and iterate based on feedback. Ideally with rough, mid, and high fidelity prototypes if time or budget constraints would allow.
If there are a few things to change if I were to do this again the would be:
More in depth User Persona/Stories.
Restructure the wording for the questions to be less leading and leave it more open ended.