Heuristic Evaluation of Penny Juice Website

By: Weihan Zhang

Introduction

       The website of Penny Juice, (https://www.pennyjuice.com) is selling the pure juice for children in the US, which is using to support the children's health and growth. It allows customers to buy fruit juice online with free delivery nationwide. Penny Juice is a family-owned business and has been in the beverage industry for more than 40 years. But there are still some usability issues which affect user experience and need to be solved. In this post, all pages on this website are evaluated by using Nielsen’s 1994 heuristics. I will present some major issues that I found on it and performed the evaluation with users.

Usability issues and recommendations

1. The user has to enter too much information to fill in the order page

       We can see from Fig. 1. that the user has to enter too much information to fill in the order page. To consider Nielsen’s1994 heuristics, this violates the rule of user recognition rather than recall. It is essential to minimize the user's memory burden and help the user to recognize the product item. The product should give the user an option to allow the user to choose and select directly, rather than instead of typing it themselves. There are too many quantity information need to fill, which makes users feel impatient. 

Fig. 1. Order page

Recommendation:

       There are multiple ways to change this problem, and the best way is using the item image, description, quantity and price on this page. It would be more comfortable for the user to be able to select from a list of products. Each product would have an image and price, as well as the ability to select options. This might look like what is shown in Fig 2.

Fig. 2. Product page

2. The information check is not comprehensive

       Fig. 1. shows that users should type all information to submit the order. But we find that only contact name and e-mail address fields are required. Other fields such as phone number, street address and different flavors don’t affect the submission of orders. Besides, the check rule of an e-mail address is incomplete, which doesn’t identify a real e-mail address. To consider Nielsen’s 1994 heuristics, these violate the rules of preventing errors and helping users recognize from errors. For example, When users type the e-mail address without @ before submitting the order, it doesn’t remind users about it. Another example, if users type 1@1 and submit the order, the website just circles this field with red without providing any error messages. This causes that users don’t know how to correct the e-mail information.

Fig. 3. Information check

Recommendation:

       The order section should mark some fields as required by using * to represent it so that users will know which information is optional. For entering different flavor quantity, because I find these fields can be entered in any characters, it should be checked by required and numbers only to prevent errors. The e-mail address should be checked by using more complete rules to guarantee that it should be a real address. It should alert users while they are typing the information before submitting.

3. The footer contains too many unnecessary details

       We can see from Fig. 4. that it is essential to minimize the contents in the footer section. To include the unrelated or low-frequency information will directly affect the usability. All the extra information in the web page will reduce the relative visibility of the primary content. The footer section of Penny Juice has too many unnecessary details, which makes the customer confuse the details and fundamental information about the footer. This issue violates the rule of using aesthetic and minimalist design.

Fig. 4. Footer section

Recommendation: 

       To minimize unnecessary information and content, which is very important to improve the user experience. Therefore, the best way is making the footer as simple as possible. We can divide the footer section into 3 parts, which are social media, contact us and payment method. We can keep the payment method part, but for social media part we should minimize them as shown in Fig 5 or Tweets could be shown in the right margin on the main webpage.

Fig. 5. Social media

       For the contact us part, we can only show “Contact Us” in the footer section. The detail information including address, phone, email, and fax should be displayed on another page for contacting the company. Too much detail information in the footer section will distract the user’s attention to the primary content page so we can simplify them by redesigning it with this improvement.

4. The payment page is not clear for the user to view their purchased details

       The payment page only has the "CASE" as a description, which is not clear for the user to overview their purchased product. Users need to see the detail descriptions about this product rather than a single word. This violates the rule of making the system match the real world. The website should use the language and words that users can understand.

Fig. 6. Payment page

Recommendation: 

       The payment page can be redesigned. It is imperative to illustrate the product details and information clearly. Therefore, the payment details must be pointed out the product name, price, item description, delivery option and so on. For the description part, it should show a picture of this product. This picture can be hyperlinked to another page for showing detail product information. It will directly improve the usability and user experience.

5. The website lacks user control and freedom

       If users submit the order by mistake, there is no checking on users about that. Users only click the button for submitting. If they want to edit information after the order is submitted or view the submitted order, there is no way to do that on this website. This violates the rule of user control and freedom. Users can’t undo any accidental actions. 

Recommendation: 

       For solving this issue, users should be taken to a confirmation page to confirm whether to submit the order or edit some order information. If users confirm to submit the order, the website should provide functionalities to view the order information and edit their information if they want. If users want to edit the order information, the website should allow them to change it and give feedback to users, telling them that the information has been updated. These improvements increase the ability of user control and give users the freedom to undo any accidental changes.

6. No “help” option on the website

       There is no “help” option on this website. If users encounter some problems and want to ask questions, it will be very inconvenient. The website has an address, email, phone, and fax contact information. But I think they are not the fastest ways to get help. Users can’t find any help documentation on the website. This violates the rule of providing adequate help and documentation.

Fig. 7. Contact information

Recommendation: 

1. The website should provide a help page that shows documentation for frequently asked queries so that users can read and solve problems themselves. 
2. Another suggestion is to offer a 24-hour online chatting service to answer user questions.

       These solutions will improve the user experience for the website.

Conclusion

       To sum up, it is important to consider the existing issues based on the heuristic evaluation. Developers should consider these problems and improvements to improve the existing website, which can attract more customers. It is also significant to redesign the website, such as navigation bar, footer and so on. These improvements will directly increase the usability and also improve the user experience for the website.