User Experience Report: Ebay.com UX Report

USER EXPERIENCE REPORT: EBAY.COM UX REPORT
Your Name
Course No.
Professor
UNIVERSITY/COLLEGE
20th September 2018
Ebay.com User Experience (UX) Report
Introduction
EBay.com is a premier online auction platform that has over 175 million active users. The website’s active users surpassed the 171 million mark during the first quarter of 2018 thereby making eBay the second largest shopping website (Hasker& Sickles, 2018). The site was ranked #33 globally in the last 6 months according to Alexa ranking and enjoys the highest popularity in the United States where it has solid customer base. Notwithstanding its popularity, the site can still improve its niche and global ranking if it can improve on the website usability and accessibility metrics. Statistics suggest that over 60% of eBay users are aged below 50, implying that the website usability and user experience has been optimized for this target audience (Hasker& Sickles, 2018). This report provides a brief evaluation of eBay’s user experience (UX) by evaluating various accessibility functions on eBay.com. A live evaluation was conducted on eBay.com and followed by a review of the findings.
Methods
An open source evaluation tool known as Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FEE) v 2.0.11 was used to evaluate EBay’s code to ascertain its degree of usability. The HTML code was evaluated to determine the websites suitability for use by different categories of users. The FAE v2 was considered ideal for the assignment since it is able to evaluate and analyze a domain and all its sub-domains and functionality components such as images, tables, links, forms, widgets/scripts, headings, styles and site navigation (Byun& Finnie, 2011). The results were then checked for consistency with the best HTML coding practices and standards set by the iCITA. The homepage was later evaluated using FAE v2.0. Secondly, the item selling process was evaluated to determine its usability and accessibility. Furthermore, the simple versions of the item selling page as well as its advanced version were evaluated by a select group of users. However, the item purchase and selling process could not be successfully completed since login was required in order to access the seller’s page. Although login server restrictions posed a challenge to the evaluation process, FAE v2.0.11 was able to analyze a few sections that did not require login. Observations were also used where a group of five students were asked to access eBay and navigate different website sections such as the item selling and purchasing sections. Afterwards, the students were interviewed to capture their user experience. Interview questions were framed based on the Standardized Usability Questionnaires (Sauro & Lewis, 2012). The questions are outline below.
Interview Questions
Question 1: Would you trust the price of an item sold online? If yes, to what extent would you trust it?
Question 2: Explain your experience while trying to sell, buy or make payments on eBay.com.
Question 3: Would you rate eBay.com auction as simple and easy, or complicated?
A sample size of ten students was used to gather information on the website’s usability. Participating students were required...