Guitar Center

1. Navigation Flow
2. Wire Frame
3. Mobile Site Expert Review
4. Analytics

Navigation Flow

Guitar Center's web E-Commerce site has a complex navigation. Here is the navigation flow diagram for the existing Wish List created using Omnigraffle.

 Small Navigation Diagram

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Wire Frames

Guitar Center is looking to improve it's Shopping Cart and Checkout. Here are some of the wire frames for the proposed look of the Shopping Cart and Checkout.

Adding an item to the Shopping Cart

Updated Shopping Cart

Editing an item

A similar dialog is shown for adding an item from the Related Accessories or Similar Items.

Checkout: Step 1 - Shipping

The following "progressive checkout" has the advantage over traditional checkouts of showing all information on one page while allowing a customer to not be overwhelmed by the amount of information.

If a customer has already logged in then they would start on step 2, billing with most of the information pre-filled in. If a logged in customer did not have to change the shipping address or billing they would only need to supply their Credit Card ID.

Checkout: Step 2 - Billing

Error Checking

Multi Pay

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Mobile Site Expert Review

I performed an expert review of the Guitar Center mobile application: http://m.guitarcenter.com/ and identified over one hundred usability issues.

Here are small samplings of some of the issues and required fixes.

Issue: Footer has duplicate search area

The duplicate search area blends in with the main information on the page.

Example is with Find a Store, but all pages, except the home page, have this.

Recommendation

Either remove the duplicate control or place it in a red background so it looks like part of a consistent footer. 

Issue: "Zip Code" in Zip Code field is not helpful

Recommendation

Either retrieve a default Zip Code from the phone’s GPS or leave blank.

Issue: Position of Coupon Code in the Shopping Cart

Placing the coupon code below the "Checkout" button does not allow for a logical navigation flow.

Recommendation

Here is redesign of the screen.

Issue: "Find Friend's Wish List" is missing information that show on the website

My Account” > “My Wish List” > “Find a Friend’s Wish List” > “Wish List Result” > “Friend’s Wish List Items”

Recommendation

Show missing information and add an easy to see "Add to Cart" button for each item.

Change the title to "Friend'sName's Wish List".

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Analytics

Summaries of analytics from CrazyEgg. I loved CrazyEgg's Overlay and List features

The following is a summary of all CrazyEgg reports. It represents the average values for of seven reports.

GC Home Page (7 reports)

Each report is based on 5000 visits with an average of 5 hours 27 minutes.   

Average number of clicks:  5097 (about 1 click per person)

Heatmap

The usage did not change much over the five reports.  The following areas were consistently the high use areas:

• Keyword or item # search most used
• Used gear was the most selected tab
• Guitar was the most selected category
• People look at the different top banners via the thumbnails
• “On Sale” tab was the most selected from top picks, on sale, new arrivals, rebates
• People scroll through the thumbnails on the carousel
• Few people click on the information in the footer. Those that did mostly clicked on Careers.

Scrollmap ( 2 reports)

• Less than 50% of customers scroll past the fold (bottom of Top Picks tabs)
• Less than 25% of customers scroll to the footer area

Confetti

The different categories of users (first visit or repeat) all tended to click in the same areas. 

Referrer

Total average clicks: 5097

• Direct / guitarcenter.com are the largest referrers with an average of 67.55%
• Google.com was always second place with an average of 16.87%

From this I conclude that most people directly navigated to the Guitar Center website. 

Return Visitor

Assuming that these numbers are accurate (not a given), then it appears that most customers are new customers.  Furthermore, it looks like only about 1/3^rd of customers return to the site.

Also looking at the Confetti maps of the new and returning customers they both commonly interacted with the same parts of the home page.   

Overlay

The three areas with the highest click rates remained consistent through all five tests.   The following is the average of all the percentages.

The data indicates that searching via a keyword/item # is the most common action.   The next common actiion is to view the items in the Top Picks , On Sale, New Arrivals and Rebates tab area.   The third common action is to select the Guitar tab directly.

The other thing of note is that most people navigate directly to the Guitar Center web site.  Of those that use a search engine most enter the site via Goggle.

As for return visits, most people go directly to the site (note the % of users that did not use search terms).   Of those that search for the site most look for “guitar center”.     Looking at the top search term report shows that most of the search terms are variations on “guitar center” such as “guitarcenter”. 

Customers don't oten use the icons that allow them to view information created by Guitar Center for Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and the GC Blog.   At most two people clicked on these icons on each report.

List (Both)

The three top areas that users clicked on did not change over the reports.  The average number of clicks on these areas are:

• Keyword or item #............... 17.10%
• imagebrowse nextPage right.. 10.54%
• Guitar...................................   7.36%

The only slightly surprising result here is that customers look at the products in the Top Picks, On Sale, New Arrivals and Rebate Tabs more than they directly click on the Guitar tab.

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