What We Can Easily See & Visual Search

Visual Search 

In the visual search test the participants first saw a black page with one element of the page. After pressing the spacebar the complete website was shown. People had to search for the element and to click on it. For the home page eleven elements were used. These can be seen in the image below:

The results of this for the home page  are shown in the graph below:

The elements used for the search of the CD page are shown below:

The results of this for the CD page are shown below:

Conclusion

Search home page

When looking at the graph in the results section, it becomes clear that it was the easiest to find the login button, the search section and the Velvet logo. The graph shows that finding the like button for Facebook was the hardest part of the website to search for, followed by offers.

Search CD page

When looking at the graph in the results section, it becomes clear that the price, barcode and order on the CD page were easiest to find. It took the participants the most time to find the ‘add a Facebook comment’ part on the website, followed by the track list, genre and delivery time. 

What we can easily see

For this experiment two different images of the website were used: the normal website page and the website page where an element is missing. These images were shown quickly after each other and with a grey screen between them. The participants had to search for the item that was appearing and disappearing. The results of this are shown in the graphs below.

For the home page:

 For the CD page:

Conclusion

When looking at the graph in the results section, it becomes easily clear that the Velvet logo, the chart and the Facebook-comment parts of the website were easy to be recognized to be appearing and disappearing. Meanwhile, the appearing and disappearing CD album was hardest to discover, followed by the expected date and price. But these two have values close to navigation, language, genre and order. 

Overall conclusion

When comparing these different conclusions, general conclusions about the website of Velvet music can be drawn. It was easiest for the participants to find the Velvet logo, the chart section, login button, search section, barcode and order. It was the hardest for the participants to find the CD cover, expected date, Facebook like button, offers, track list, genre and delivery time.

Discussion

The validity of the results can be doubted because of the setup of the test. First, the tests were all conducted at different places and different laptops with different visual qualities were used. This could have caused the participants to see the different parts easier or harder. For example, a participant could have conducted the test and had troubles with the size of the symbol on the screen while on another screen he would not have had this problem. 

Second, in the search assignments the participants had to search for a specific symbol and click on it. The program was built in a way that they had to click on one specific place on the symbol. Sometimes participants had trouble selecting the symbols while they already saw them. This increases the time to find the symbol significantly. This is especially possible for large items, such as the search section, the shopping chart, the Facebook comment, the CD cover and the Velvet logo. This could have caused the high measured search time of Facebook comment in the search the CD page part and the CD cover on the CD page.

Also, not all parts and sections of the website were tested. Perhaps there were parts on the website that were not included in the test that were very hard or easy to find. 

Finally, there was not a real participant group chosen. The ratio between ages and gender of the participants is maybe not representative for the results.