aiaio - the Alexander Interactive blog

After speaking at Internet Retailer, I got several follow-up questions about how I reviewed websites on the fly. It's a great question, and rather than tuck it into an email or Twitter @reply, I thought I'd share it here.

Critiquing a website on stage is a unique endeavor. What it largely comes down to is playing to the strengths of one's co-presenters. Ethan Giffin, with whom I've presented before, focuses on conversion, looking at buttons and sales opportunities. Craig Smith quickly established his interest in SEO and search. That left me free to discuss information architecture and messaging, which are my own strong suits.

I'm not sure IRCE knew it had such a balanced team, but the result was a great rat-a-tat dissection of the sites we saw, with minimal overlap and dissent. Last time around, Ethan and I, and our third presenter, agreed with each other a lot; this time, the three of us carved out niches and took turns presenting ideas. We were all pleased with how it went.

Offstage, the process is a bit different. Ai does competitive reviews that encapsulate my criteria in painstaking detail--we often have more than 100 fields, laid out in a spreadsheet, to consider for each site. Our research categories are arranged as follows:

• Branding and design: The first step is to consider whether a site is properly conveying its brand message. How polished is the design? Is the color scheme appropriate to the company and its target audiences? Are page layouts consistent and brand imagery persistent as one moves through the site? We also look at copy, and gauge how effectively the site is speaking to users, on everything from headlines to buttons to page text.
• Navigation and ease of use: This is the core of Ai's user experience focus. We gauge how intuitive and logical a website is, and make sure that performing essential tasks is easy to execute. Objectively, we check navigation bars, page widths, pop-up windows and the like; subjectively, we look at UX on a more holistic level, to see how well the site performs.
• Content: This varies by site type. For ecommerce sites (like the ones discussed at IR) we focus on product pages, and we run them through a robust checklist. How big are images, and are they manipulable? Is essential information easy to parse? Are important functions above the fold? What supplemental features, like reviews and technical specifications, are available? For content-driven sites, the focus shifts to hierarchies, layouts, and so forth.
• Conversion: How well does a site seal the deal? We count steps in checkout, complexities in form data, and identify whether customer service is readily available. We also look at up-sell, cross-sell and shipping displays, each of which can be an opportunity or a deterrent to people in the conversion funnel.
• Intangibles: There's actually a field on our spreadsheet called "Vibe," where we give our overall impressions of what the site is saying to its users. This is a vital component of our process. No critique can be completely objective; each site has a distinct audience to which it speaks, and our job is to assess how well the message will be received by the site's target segments. We also gauge the overall experience of exploring the site, and we actually overweight these two fields to give UX the proper amount of influence in our research.

Whew! There's a lot to cover to critique a site in depth. Our most recent competitive review spreadsheet spanned more than 1500 fields. It's a smart way to learn the landscape, though--and when the spotlight is trained on one site, a similar-minded critique is a great way to assess a site.