E-commerce and Usability

1. My Company is Dell

Using the company that you chose in Unit 1 as a basis, what kind of report card would you give their home page based on:

• Intuitive design? How much effort did it take you to understand the information architecture and navigation at first look?
• Ease of learning? How fast did you learn to use the interface on the site? Do they use familiar layouts or one you had to figure out first?
• Memorability? After you visited the site for the first time, was it easy enough to remember how to get around and get tasks done on subsequent visits?
• Error frequency? Did you make errors while using the site? Were you able to adjust and find the right way quickly?
• Subjective satisfaction? How much did you like using the site? What would you change?

Explain how the information from Usability.gov can be turned into strategies that can help the company attain marketing success.

2.

we will use the standard site for looking at simple traffic metrics: Alexa.com.

• Visit Alexa. If for some reason Alexa is not available, you may use TrafficEstimate instead. See the Resources for links to these sites.
• Enter the URL from the company you chose in Unit 1.
• Find the answers to the following:
  • What do the traffic numbers mean to your site?
  • Is there a bounce rate for your company? What does this mean?
  • Can you find daily pageviews and time on site numbers? Have they been increasing lately, or decreasing?
  • How would you, as a marketer, use this information to create strategies for Web marketing?

3.

Before creating your ad:

• Think of several keywords or key phrases that are relevant to your project company’s Web site content. Search for these keyword phrases on major search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and note which ones return the highest number of hits. If your project topic is specialized and you know of a topic-specific search engine, you may use this as well.
• Try, if you choose, one of the optional keyword research tools to see the search volume based on past searches, cost estimates to bid on a particular word or phrase, and additional suggestions for related words or phrases.