RealDealz aims to make it easier to find the best deals on video games and software products by creating an all-in-one platform. This allows users to spend less time moving between multiple websites and allows for them to find their desired product quickly so they can spend less time searching and more time playing.
Our team conducted competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation, created personas and scenarios, and sketches to gain a better understanding of the users.
Competitive Analysis: Our team conducted an analysis of our primary competitors, namely Isthereanydeal.com, CheapShark, slickdeals.net, Humble Bundle, gg.deals, and Fanatical. The purpose of the analysis was to identify their major strengths and weaknesses, with the aim of leveraging this information to differentiate and enhance our own product.
Heuristic Evaluation: Our team performed a heuristic evaluation, which is a method for usablity inspection that involves inspecting an interface and identifing any potential violations of a set of usability principles, on our strongest competitors to better understand the average user experience and usability of their site to later leverage into our site.
Personas and Scenarios: Our team created personas and scenarios so we could focus on the specific needs and goals of our target demographic.
Sketches: Our team utilized sketching as a low-fidelity prototyping technique to explore and refine the user experience of our product.
Competitive Analysis: When analyzing our competitors we discovered that many of the websites that they use are very clunky. We would benefit from a site that is much more simple and less cluttered than the competitors.
Heuristic Evaluation: While evaluating our strongest competitors using heuristic evaluation, we discovered more subtle issues with their sites. Sites like “isthereanydeal.com” are not great at handling errors, providing documentation or any contact information. Some of these errors include broken links, no indication that the site was loading, and not being able to report errors with the site.
Personas and Scenarios: Writing personas and scenarios for multiple of our potential clients, allowed us to recognize who will be the most likely to use our product as well as what they would like our product to be able to accomplish.
Sketches: By sketching out how each persona would be able to satisfy their specific needs with our service, we were able to find an optimal layout for our site.
Based on our findings from each of the research methods we conducted, we concluded that our UX design for our website should be relatively simple, less cluttered, and easier for the user to navigate. It should not only be simple and easy to use, but reliable and able to handle errors effectively and efficiently. In the future, we can use wireframes to better indicate the more specific details of the way we think the user would like the site to be laid out. If these recommendations are implemented in the future, it will lead to a more efficient and reliable website that could potentially surpass competitors.