Wilson Expert Evaluation
About
Wilson sporting Goods is a sports equipment company headquartered in Chicago. The company was having trouble with their conversion rates. People were visiting the site but leaving without making a purchase. They wanted us to offer up some potential reasons why this might be happening. In particular, they wanted us to focus on tennis players, as they were working on an initiative with the USTA.
1.0 Expert Evaluation
I took a look at the main Wilson sporting goods site, beginning with Home page and the navigation. I then looked at the subsites for baseball, tennis, accessories and apparel, and examined individual product pages. I also looked at the product search feature, and product sorting and filtering. I looked at all of these aspects on mobile as well.
I made note of all of the positive and negative aspects of the site, and categorized these findings into three overarching themes. These themes revolved around Wayfinding, Product Details, and the Mobile Experience. I also created a few hypothesis why the site conversion rate was so low. We decided to test these hypotheses through user testing.
2.0 User Testing
I created a research plan to test whether the site's conversion rate was being affected by the problems with the wayfinding and product details. We decided to test 10 people by giving them a series of tasks to accomplish on the site. These tasks included finding a suitable tennis racket and finding related tennis accessories and clothing. Testing was conducted remotely using Validately. 5 were sent to the desktop site and 5 were sent to the mobile site. Tester responses were recorded and analyzed.
User testing revealed some serious issues with the Wilson navigation, as well as with the product search function and product sorting. The most troubling finding was that none of the mobile users were able to complete all of the tasks, due to technical difficulties on the Wilson site. In regards to wayfinding, user testing revealed several steps that Wilson could take to improve the shopping experience for novice athletes. Results of the user test were distilled down into a presentation which was presented to the executives at Wilson. Wilson executives have elected to move forward with the recommendations that we presented.
