Kathryn McDonnell

About Kathryn McDonnell

Fight Club! Toys R Us vs Smyths

Did you miss out on the bargains of Black Friday? Perhaps in an effort to catch up you’re reading this in between filling your online Christmas shopping basket.  

If so, you’re in good company as today is Cyber Monday which typically has the biggest online sales of the year.

Ahead of this landmark day, we decided to take a look at two major toy retailers, which have both an online and offline presence: Smyths and ToysRUs

What users think of B&Q’s new responsive site

Last month, B&Q unveiled a new responsive website, as part of a £60m redesign of its website and backend systems. 

The new site was reviewed by David Moth earlier this month and to follow this up we decided to get some feedback by asking users to test the site, using whatusersdo.

A mix of desktop, mobile and tablet users were asked to perform two tasks on the site. The first was a targeted shop to find internal door handles and go through the purchase process up until payment.

As the new site prominently features sections titled ‘Inspiration’ and ‘Projects’, the second was to gather ideas for updating a room of their choice.  

So what did the users think of the site? 

What does AmazonFresh bring to the online grocery marketplace?

The Amazon subsidiary AmazonFresh has been selling groceries in the US for several years now but is starting to expand its reach across the US, adding San Francisco and Los Angeles to its delivery areas last year.  

With around a fifth of us in the UK buying our food online the practice is well established, so what innovations may the online retail giant bring to this marketplace?

We asked a group of US based users to try out the service using Whatusersdo to record the results. 

Where did the Marks & Spencer website relaunch go wrong?

When the news about Marks and Spencer’s sales results broke a couple of weeks ago it immediately got my attention.

The Chief Executive and other senior figureheads clearly laid the blame of the 8.1% drop in sales and resulting share price dip on the launch of its new website.

The new site comprised a smart redesign coupled with a platform shift from Amazon’s services to its own.

There have been many documented cases of website usability causing a huge impact to revenue (the $300m button being the most famous) so I wondered whether this too was one such example or whether more cynically perhaps, the City had been handed an unfortunate scapegoat. 

Five key themes for fashion ecommerce success

So here’s the bad news. It’s no longer enough for your site to be ‘usable’ and ‘intuitive’. Today’s best in breed online retailers mastered the usability thing a while back and have long moved on.

To survive in a competitive market your site must also draw customers in, provide ideas, inspiration and help all without being overly attentive and obtrusive. 

Whether your site is selling high fashion or stationery, we can all learn something from the most successful online retailers. We used whatusersdo.com to find out what was working best on two big fashion retail sites: ASOS and H&M.

Here are the five key themes both have hit upon to help them to their success.