User Experience Report: Ebay.com UX Report

USER EXPERIENCE REPORT: EBAY.COM UX REPORT
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Course No.
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UNIVERSITY/COLLEGE
20th September 2018
Ebay.com User Experience (UX) Report
Introduction
EBay.com is a premier online auction platform that has over 175 million active users. The website’s active users surpassed the 171 million mark during the first quarter of 2018 thereby making eBay the second largest shopping website (Hasker& Sickles, 2018). The site was ranked #33 globally in the last 6 months according to Alexa ranking and enjoys the highest popularity in the United States where it has solid customer base. Notwithstanding its popularity, the site can still improve its niche and global ranking if it can improve on the website usability and accessibility metrics. Statistics suggest that over 60% of eBay users are aged below 50, implying that the website usability and user experience has been optimized for this target audience (Hasker& Sickles, 2018). This report provides a brief evaluation of eBay’s user experience (UX) by evaluating various accessibility functions on eBay.com. A live evaluation was conducted on eBay.com and followed by a review of the findings.
Methods
An open source evaluation tool known as Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FEE) v 2.0.11 was used to evaluate EBay’s code to ascertain its degree of usability. The HTML code was evaluated to determine the websites suitability for use by different categories of users. The FAE v2 was considered ideal for the assignment since it is able to evaluate and analyze a domain and all its sub-domains and functionality components such as images, tables, links, forms, widgets/scripts, headings, styles and site navigation (Byun& Finnie, 2011). The results were then checked for consistency with the best HTML coding practices and standards set by the iCITA. The homepage was later evaluated using FAE v2.0. Secondly, the item selling process was evaluated to determine its usability and accessibility. Furthermore, the simple versions of the item selling page as well as its advanced version were evaluated by a select group of users. However, the item purchase and selling process could not be successfully completed since login was required in order to access the seller’s page. Although login server restrictions posed a challenge to the evaluation process, FAE v2.0.11 was able to analyze a few sections that did not require login. Observations were also used where a group of five students were asked to access eBay and navigate different website sections such as the item selling and purchasing sections. Afterwards, the students were interviewed to capture their user experience. Interview questions were framed based on the Standardized Usability Questionnaires (Sauro & Lewis, 2012). The questions are outline below.
Interview Questions
Question 1: Would you trust the price of an item sold online? If yes, to what extent would you trust it?
Question 2: Explain your experience while trying to sell, buy or make payments on eBay.com.
Question 3: Would you rate eBay.com auction as simple and easy, or complicated?
A sample size of ten students was used to gather information on the website’s usability. Participating students were required to review the website after which they were asked to answer the above three questions. The student’s response to the above questions were then captured and used to inform the findings section. The participants were then asked to describe the difficulties encountered while trying to make a purchase or sell an item on eBay.com. In addition, they were also required to give feedback on how they rated the image upload process. Besides, semi-structured focus groups were also used to capture the participant’s view on the website accessibility and usability.
RESULTS
Based on the FAE v2.0.11 website evaluation output, most website components were accessible and passed the evaluation test. The output of the home page evaluation was captured and is available in the Appendix section. The evaluation revealed that the home page bars had a passing level of 65% whereas warnings were at 35%. The warnings on the pages could be as a result of dead links that point to other external links. The selling section of eBay had a high navigation score rated at 98%. Besides, all the image maps passed with 100% especially on mouse overs. The evaluation also established that each image had a well-defined Alt tag, which is a great accessibility function for screen reader users (Majid, Kamaruddin&Mansor, 2015).
Despite the high pass score for various sections, the website needs accessibility enhancement to improve user experience. In particular, the homepage evaluation report indicates that there were issues with titles and in some sections, subheadings. Besides, several issues were identified with the form control functionalities, website languages, labeled images and use of layout tables as data holders (eBay, 2018). The website scored dismally on the home page organization, selling and item purchase processes. The poor score for language can be linked to the fact that eBay is a multinational company with multiple subdomains and local domain codes.
As far as the page titles were concerned, over 50% passed whereas warnings scored 15%. The report i...