The importance of navigability when navigating through student merchandise : A study to research how navigability could improve student e-commerce

Abstract: The purpose of this report is to examine how a web application should be designed with regard to navigability. E-commerce is a growing sector hence it is of great value to know how to build a web application for the users, this report has chosen to focus on students as the target group. The theory explains that web applications should have a clear visual hierarchy with few focal points as it helps users navigate the web application. It should resemble other similar platforms and be developed in accordance with Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 usability Heuristics. The approach to test the hypothesis based from the the- ory is by evaluating different versions of the web application by user tests in regard to the ISO/IEC 25000 and Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 usability heuristics. The method is then analysed with advantages such as multiple anonymous randomised user tests, and disadvantages such as a very small segment of the population being tested. Furthermore, the method were based in relevant theory. A web application that has a reasonable design with no clear distractions and no unnecessary information leads to less mouse clicks, faster times completing tasks and a more pleasant user experience.  Extra features such as sorting and filtering were expressed by the test participants as functions that were missing when they were not implemented, and led to faster times and less errors when test participants had such options. Even a web application with the useful features, but with a disturbing design would still result in a bad user experience. Some features were sparsely used or not used at all during the user tests. This could have been avoided with a different implementation of the user tests. When features and design improvements were removed, following the Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 usability heuris- tics, they were missed by the test participants which proved that the theory is applicable on a real web application. For the user to experience that it is a usable and navigable web application, the web application need to use familiar features and a design that emphasise the important features on the page.