Bloomsbury Publishing and A&C Black sell books directly to their customers online. Users have a wide choice when buying books via the internet so Bloomsbury Publishing must have an exceptionally simple process if they are to encourage users to buy directly from them.
Bloomsbury already has a web team with plenty ideas about how to improve the online buying process but they needed unbiased opinions from real users. We provided them with a comprehensive user testing programme that delivered real insight.
From the knowledge they gained they were able to focus on the key improvements to the sites to improve the user journey and increase online sales.
What we did
1. Kick off workshop
We met with Bloomsbury to explain our plan for user testing and to give them the opportunity to tell us about the history of the site, what they liked and disliked about it, their audience and their ambitions and challenges for the future.
2. Test preparation
We produced screeners that explained the profiles of the users to be involved in testing, user journeys that explained how the current sites work and test scripts that explained how we would test the buying process.
We also instructed our specialist test user recruitment company on the number of users we required and their profiles. We recruited two groups of users: one set to test the live sites and another to test the prototype.
3. Live site test
We tested the live sites over two days at our offices in Leamington Spa. We recorded their on-screen interaction and commentary with TechSMith software.
We produced a comprehensive report of our findings with prioritised recommendations for improvements to key features, functionality and content.
4. Prototyping
We took the priority recommendations from our initial report and created fully interactive prototypes. These prototypes were used extensively during the second testing sessions.
We tested the prototypes over two days at our offices in Leamington Spa and recorded on-screen interaction and commentary.
5. Final report
We produced a comprehensive report of our findings and a final interactive prototype that demonstrated the improvements to features, functionality and content.
We also set up online accounts for Bloomsbury on Dropbox and Screencast where they were able to access and download all documentation, prototypes and test footage