The Borders website is quite a complex website, not just as an e-commerce platform, but also from a social media point-of-view too. The website allows people to create and share wish-lists, set up stock notifications for specific products, 'like' products and read and write reviews. The website also has a sign-up checkout, paypal and anonymous checkout, this means there is a lot that users have to potentially work their way through.
After speaking to our client about the customers they wanted to attract, as well as looking at the data we had available to us from various customer databases, we created a series of personas to help us focus on who uses the website and how they use it.
A site review was conducted where we identified the main tasks a user would use the website for. Walkthrough scripts were written for each one. Along with my own questions on areas I had identified as possible problems, I ran these test with users that fitted our personas.
Several key areas and a few smaller issues were identified throughout this process. I went back to sketch out more ideas and after running through these sketches with other team members I built a working prototype of the areas we felt were in need of work. We prioritised the checkout as a main area of concern and there were other forms and smaller areas we felt needed to be re-worked.
Running the same tests with the new working prototypes helped us clarify any remaining problems but for the most part our re-work was successful. After handing over to the designers we carried on checking that the changes we had made were still suitable when designed.