Morrisons

Morrisons has only just launched its ecommerce site. David Moth reviewed it in his article Morrisons launches its first ecommerce store in January, and summarised it thusly:

[Morrisons.com] is an average ecommerce site that suffers from a number of obvious UX flaws, most notably at the checkout.

So you’ll forgive me if I appear sceptical regarding the quality of its mobile site. Let’s take a look.

Here’s the homescreen:

At the top of the screen there is a good selection of options: a standard mobile menu button to open further navigation, a ‘contact us’ button which opens up an email contact form that also has various click-to-call helpline numbers and a ‘store locator’ that uses geolocation and again uses click-to-call buttons to speed contact with your chosen store.

The homescreen did take a while to load up though and unfortunately the carousel isn’t particularly great. It’s not particularly clear that the four tabs across the bottom indicate the area that’s being highlighted in the carousel. Also the ‘household’ image is non-existent.

Upon tapping through the carousel image to a chosen area, I’m presented with non-mobile optimised version of the site.

In fact if I turn my smartphone horizontally I can see that this is clearly the tablet version.

Something’s gone a little awry here. 

I would never recommend doing a full weekly shop via smartphone whether the site was responsive or not, as tablets are much better suited for this.

However, as the Morrisons site has been scored according to how it appears on an iPhone 4, that’s exactly what I’m using, plus it’s still crucial for the smartphone experience to be just as user friendly for the mobile shopper in order to increase conversion

When tapping menu, these are the options.

Then upon tapping ‘shop groceries’ I’m taken through to this version of the site.

This is ridiculous. It’s not even the desktop version. It’s some weird non-desktop/non-mobile version that hides an ad for its app all the way down in the bottom right corner.

So it turns out Morrisons has an app. Which is weird because according to The Search Agency UK, Morrisons scores a zero for not having an app presence.

To give the research its credit, it looks like the app appeared in December 2013, and the study was completed before this. 

The high overall mark for Morrisons still doesn’t ring true though. Load speed was poor, mobile site bizarrely optimised just for the homescreen, no social media presence and apparently no app availability. The study it seems is already out of date.

Morrisons new online life has had a few hiccups, most of which are outlined here in what user tests tell us about Morrisons grocery site, however I think it will be worth looking at the app in another study to see if it redresses the balance at all.

Tesco

Apparently Tesco aces each category in the study. It has the fastest download speed and load speed, the clearest social media buttons and app presence, and hosts a mobile optimised site, which is apparently the best that any retailers on the FTSE 100 can achieve.

I can’t really argue with the speed of it. 

I was also presented with an app download button when I tapped through to ‘groceries’.

There are social media buttons visible just below the first screen, plus a store locator and a contact us button that immediately launches a click-to-call.

The study doesn’t really take into account functionality when it comes to actually navigating, searching or shopping on the site. However just by having a properly optimised mobile site that you can actually use instead of being redirected to an app download or desktop site means it immediately deserves to be praised above Morrisons.

I’ll take a look at the Tesco mobile site in terms of user experience, and compare it to the competition later in the week.