B2B E-Commerce Case Study:
UX Expert Review of Aggreko’s B2B Website
The world’s largest temporary power company was seeking a UX evaluation of its new site for heavy equipment rentals. We led a heuristic evaluation that uncovered 34 improvement opportunities.
Published on January 23, 2023
Goal
Aggreko is the world’s largest temporary power company. It supplies power to many of the globe’s largest sporting events, music festivals, and conferences — from the FIFA World Cup to the Olympic Games to the UN Climate Change Conference.
Aggreko recently launched a new website for heavy equipment rentals. The site complemented Aggreko’s main US website (aggreko.com). The initial version of the rentals site focused on getting products online quickly without much focus on the user experience.
The Aggreko team hired Marketade to conduct a rapid website evaluation that identified opportunities for UX improvement. While the team was most focused on the new rentals site, they were also interested in opportunities to improve their primary US website. The team needed the recommendations within 3 weeks.
Approach
We conducted an expert UX review, also known as a heuristic evaluation or a UX audit. We reviewed the overall structure, navigation, and information display from a best practices point of view.
Before starting, we stressed to Aggreko that, while this type of review is a great starting point, it does not replace or reduce the importance of observation-based UX research such as usability testing or IA studies.
We followed these 5 broad steps for our review:
1. Understand business goals
- Facilitated a kickoff meeting with our project sponsors
- Interviewed key stakeholders within Aggreko to better understand the primary personas and their key tasks on the sites
- Conducted a background review of competitor sites
2. Understand users and tasks
- Reviewed the key tasks on the site
- Defined probable scenarios for the key personas (existing customers, new prospects)
3. First pass through the user flows
- Reviewed the global navigation, site search and main pages
- Reviewed primary CTAs and primary content zones
4. Detailed review against heuristics
- Evaluated each section against the guidelines
- Documented our findings and captured screenshots
5. Assign severity
- Ranked each finding based on the probable impact on task completion
* * *
As part of our process, we borrowed well-established tools from leading UX experts.
We incorporated Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics for user interface design. Nielsen developed these broad rules of thumb in 1994; decades later, they still apply to most designs and digital products. While they don’t provide specific usability guidelines, they do help us with the initial identification of UX problems.
For the severity rankings, we used a 4-point scale created by Jinny Redish and Joe Dumas in 1999:
- Level 1: Prevents the user from completing a task.
- Level 2: Creates a significant delay in task completion.
- Level 3: Has a minor effect on usability.
- Level 4: Subtle with the least effect.
Outputs
Our review uncovered 34 usability problems across the two web properties.
We grouped the problems into these 4 broad categories:
- Global elements — 9 problems
- US main site homepage — 6 problems
- US main site other sections — 6 problems
- Rentals site –13 problems
For each problem, we documented 7 attributes. Here’s an example of one problem — and its 7 attributes — from the Rentals site:
- Problem ID — 4.3
- Page or element — Products
- Problem overview — Users have to register to see prices.
- Screenshot/description of issues — Not showing any price ranges for any products can cause some users to abandon the task.
- Recommendation — Remove registration as a requirement to see prices. Review competitor sites to see how they offer prices for different rental periods.
- Heuristic (that was violated) — Mapping (Match between system and the real world)
- Severity rating — Level 1: Prevents Task Completion
We captured this information for all 34 problems in a spreadsheet with multiple tabs. For the biggest improvement opportunities, we created a wireframe to demonstrate our recommendation where possible.
Finally, we created a summary deck that we presented to senior Aggreko stakeholders. The deck included:
- An overview of the project scope and our process
- The top 8 findings and recommendations
- Recommended next steps
“Settled matters we would otherwise debate endlessly.”
About the Project
- Industry: Energy; industrial equipment
- Platforms: Website
- Audience type: B2B
- Methods: Heuristic (expert) evaluation
- Stakeholder teams: Marketing; continuous improvement
- Organization size: 6,500 employees
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