Detroit Machine Tools
OVERVIEW
This is a comprehensive user research project my teammates and I had undertaken at the University of Michigan, in the Needs assessment and Usability Evaluation course, with a machine manufacturing company called Detroit Machine Tools (formerly Smithy). My team members were Asha, Jiayi, Mayank, and Steven. |
SKILLS
Usability testing, Heuristics evaluation, Competitive analysis, Interviewing, Survey design. TOOLS
Keynote, Google Analytics, |
Problem Description
Detroit Machine Tools (DMT) is an Ann Arbor based, 30-year-old small business. DMT sells machining equipment, including mills and lathes, that can make custom metal parts, servicing a middle-end clientele who would not be able to afford industrial grade equipment, but who want higher quality machines than normal hobbyist grade ones. DMT wants our team to help improve the layout and design of their website to increase the conversion rate of online users into customers.
Methodology
Next we conducted interviews with both stakeholders and people who buy machines, based on which we created personas for site users. This was a huge learning curve, trying to get an overview of the machinist community and what they want.
We met and talked to 6 people in total, including 1 stakeholder and 5 machine tool buyers, which accumulated to a total of 6 hours of interview. From those interviews we could presume a few things about our target user. That being they were typically white males of various ages that had a formal or informal background in engineering. |
After that, we looked at more established as well as comparable websites in order to get a feel of the machining e-commerce terrain. We identified 10 products including Direct Competitors, Partial Competitors, Indirect Competitors, and Analogous Systems.
Machinists tend to heed advice from online forums and social media, so we decided to map social media presence against US site ranking. |
Then we conducted a Survey, and at this point we wanted to be sure to reach people we weren’t able to in our Interviews: particularly CNC buyers and institutional buyers. We developed a survey consisting of 18 questions, and then sent it out to various offline and online machining communities. Out of our respondents, 61% owned CNC machines and 63% were buying machines for an institution.
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At this point we started to evaluate the actual DMT website. To start, we conducted a heuristics analysis of the site. Our 5 team members each rated 47 different usability items, which we developed and adapted from Nielsen's heuristics which include aspects of Feedback, Metaphor, Navigation, Consistency and Standards, Error Prevention, Memory, Design, and lastly Help.
Finally, in the Usability Test, we asked 5 people familiar with machine tools to attempt some basic tasks and scenarios on the DMT website. We wanted to evaluate exploring the machine catalog, comparing products, and buying a specific item. The tasks were designed to emulate an ideal user scenario: from general exploration, to in depth task with specific outcomes, to complete buying process. |
Findings & Recommendations
Finding: The site design is not consistent with web standards or with itself. Links do not visually look like links, and similar pages do not have the same organization, as shown by the image to the left.
Recommendation: DMT should create a web standard-compliant template and closely follow it. Users have identified some pages that they preferred to others that DMT can work off of. |
Finding: DMT wants customers to call them to make CNC purchases, but that is not clear when looking at call-to-action elements on the site.
Recommendation: DMT should change the Add-to-Cart button to something that properly indicates how the user should proceed if they want to purchase a machine, and the phone number should be more prominent. |
Our team realizes that some of our recommendations such as the improvement to the search feature will take a lot of time. We believe that eventually all of these recommendations will prove to be worthwhile, but there are immediate improvements that DMT could implement first and adopt some suggestions later in the longer term.
We propose this timeline for the development of the website. First, pricing information can easily be added and call-to-action elements can easily be fixed. Second, a template should be developed and all pages should be made to adhere to the template. This is not going to be too difficult, as users have already identified some pages they did like, so the new template can be based on that. The contents of the site is already pretty good too. Finally, the search feature should be improved. |