Waitrose: A social and digital media review
24 March 2008
Download the PDF of this article
This week I finally got round to having the first dental appointment I have had in ooh, I don’t know, eight years! Eight years, that is awful. I could tell you that I didn’t for three years during University because I was away from home and unable to afford the costs, but at £15 for a check-up that is just nonsense. I could tell you it’s because I have been moving around the UK while I moved from job to job to build up my skill set, but that would be no excuse either. I don’t know why but it has just been something I have put off, and the more I put it off the more it had become an issue of building up dental fear. Any way, I bit the bullet this week. Mouth wide open the dentist checks my right side first, all okay. Then the left side,
“Put a check over number x”,
“And number x”.
Having never had a filling before, or any work on my teeth for that matter the fear of God ran through me. After an X-Ray to see the extent of the decay in these two teeth I was booked in for a further appointment a couple of days later to get them filled along with a general clean up of the whole lot. I didn’t feel any pain; it is just discomfort having your mouth wide open for half hour with large drills and various other metal and plastic tools working away at your teeth. I didn’t have any problems with my teeth that I knew before having this consultation. They didn’t hurt or look rotten. It just goes to show that there can be some underlying problems that you are unaware of and it is always advisable to get regular health checks.
As a digital media consultant a large part of what I do for my clients involves analysing what already exists and providing them with some answers on how they can improve upon the provision of their service. This is much like a health check. It involves taking a very close look under the microscope at how usable and accessible the website is. For particularly outdated websites this is a breeze and the amount of suggestions is infinite and usually results in a complete overhaul. However there are lots of occasions when a website is doing a lot right; even still there are usually areas which have been overlooked or are of lower priority to the company. In order to provide customers with a better web experience, improved functionality and accessibility, the teeth need to be cleaned, flossed in between and the whole mouth given a good rinse with mouthwash. What may be low priority to a business will usually lose custom due to lack of functions or inability to access. Today to show how I go about this process and how even businesses that are, comparatively to most, providing a great online service can still make a few changes in order to provide customers with the best experience possible. I have set the challenge of discovering cavities in the brand spanking new, all singing, all dancing Waitrose website created by London agency twentysix.
My reason for choosing Waitrose is because poking around the website actually inspired this blog post rather than actively searching out a website for analysis. I had read in MarketingWeek that Waitrose were embracing social media and were going to be providing blogs and a forum built-in into a complete overhaul of the design and build of the website. So I was interested to see how a large supermarket brand was going to tackle this and converse with its customers. Rather than getting caught up in the look and feel of the new site I decided to dive right on in to the blog section like a cat amongst the pigeons and see what all the hype was about in MarketingWeek. And this is where I shall start the analysis for you.
The Waitrose blog
Getting to the blog was just a mouse click away from the home page; however the menu button was placed up in the top navigation which is like a quick links menu for convenience rather than in the main menu structure which boldly sits below. With Waitrose taking the social media plunge it didn’t strike me as being high on the agenda seeing the blog link here. I would’ve liked to of seen it in the main menu which would give more emphasis of the fact they are saying “hey look this is the latest conversations we are having, why not come and join in”. The linking text reads MD’s Blog which immediately conjured up ideas in my head of a stuffy corporate dialogue of wishy-washyness and guff that no-one but the partners, investors and public relations will read. This preconceived thought was soon dashed though to my delight when I came through to what is affectively the blog introductory home page. Dashed because here the MD’s blog is renamed “The Grocer’s blog: Not so chubby” and the cut-out photo of a jolly man named Mark throwing an apple in the air and catching it (I guess) with one hand. It all looks far from stuffy, but like I said before, we are here to see how this blog performs first before we get into looks. Just one point before we move on though, why call it the MD’s blog on the home page and then something far more interesting inside?
Not so chubby
Our man Mark, the jolly grocer/managing director at Waitrose has been busy. Since 2 January 2008 no less than 42 blog posts have been written by him, I feel guilty that I haven’t taken a look before. Don’t worry Mark, I am here now. The posts all have interesting titles; they make me want to read further. The latest ‘In support of British pig farmers’ I read and am compelled to leave a comment. Now that is the power of social media. The titles aren’t at all link baiting; they are clever little tasters that make you want to bite more. The pig farmers aren’t the greatest example. Here are some additional: Valentine’s day massacre, Bloke talk and bhajis, Side effects, Jammy dodgers. I gobbled them up. The posts are entertaining, informative but above all else they’re personal. Mark, I assume you have had some excellent guidance on the approach to writing these entries. Either that or your finger is on the pulse when it comes to business to customer relations. The advice I would give to all businesses looking to embrace a social environment is to make it personal just like is seen here. Any acronyms or naming conventions you would use within your company are strictly no go when talking with the public. Keep it simple, personal and easy to read.
Walk like a blog, talk like a blog
Why did I need a profile and do I have to go in here?
When I chose to comment I was forced to create a user profile before doing so. It was the usual process of fill out a few details, obtain an email to enable the use and then sign into the website. This is a familiar process for becoming a member of a forum, however forced through such processes when leaving a blog post is not really on and some users won’t be pushed down this route resulting in the loss of comments. The usual and simple format for someone leaving a comment is to fill out a short form with name, email address, website address if you have one and then the comment content. Straying away from this leaves the user in foreign ground and usability diminishes. In addition to the problem, once signed in I was not delivered back to the blog post which I was hoping to leave a comment on, oh no, instead deposited somewhere I did not ask to be. Faced with an area of the website called the Scrapbook I now had to traverse back to the blog entry; MD’s Blog > Go to blog (if this wasn’t the latest story, which in this case it is so this step is missed out) > In support of British pig farmers. That’s two or three of my mouse clicks away! That is neither very helpful nor usable. Most web users will not have returned back to the blog to leave the comment, exasperated by the confusion. Many more would’ve left. How should it be fixed? A query string to record which blog post I was in would have corrected this so on sign in I would be transferred to the blog post, preferably with an anchor point to the comments form (if the comments form was in the same page as the post ? we’ll get to that in a moment). Now I do see why Waitrose wish to plonk newly signed profile users to the ‘Scrapbook’ in it being an area where further details can be applied along with changing profile pictures and introducing all the juicy extras that I discuss later on. But if this is so high on the priority list then please be a bit more clever and provide an interim page which welcomes new signees and gives two options: continue leaving blog comment, find out about your Scrapbook. This way it is introduced but does not impinge on the user experience. Alternatively deliver me to the blog comments form as before and once I have sent commentary give me the option of redirecting to the ‘Scrapbook’. Orientating ones self on a website can be difficult at the best of times let alone if I am spat out somewhere I did not ask to be. It is always a good idea to user test a process once it has been built. Make sure everything is linear and focused. Carry out an action and if for any reason a diversion occurs this needs to be corrected.
Unintuitive comments
When you comment at Waitrose you do so out of sight of the post and out of sight of whoever else has commented. Comments are left on a crisp new page. It reminds me of the Blogger pop-up window but worse. At least in a pop-up you can still see the page of the post being commented on. Why it is here I do not know, but I really think this should all happen in the blog post page being read. This way when someone is commenting they can either quote from the main blog entry or react to others comments without having to head back in the browsing history to copy some text or reread another’s comments. The possibility of misquoting is also greatly increased using the current new page for comments method. There is also nothing snazzy about the comment form, it is usual practice on comments to be able to supply your own website so others may visit if they find what you write of interest. This is how the blog community works and how we as bloggers network with one another. Not allowing this is just clipping wings and won’t inspire me to comment regularly at Waitrose. More intuitive comment forms allow some HTML mark-up too. Others even give you an option to quote someone else’s comments. There is none of that business here. Making processes as easy as possible to communicate and broaden the conversation will always rate highly with businesses that are able to achieve this.
Separate the experts from the customers
Waitrose has been clever with comment types, and I can’t put my finger on another website which does similar. They provide two types of commentary by separating experts from customers. At a glance users can see which posts have had comments from each type which is brilliant. Getting comparisons from the two types of users once the website becomes more rowdy on a particular topic will be great. This should come as standard on all business blogs. Nice touch Waitrose.
Blogging Hell
Moving on to the main blog entries I will just reiterate that Mark is doing a great job in the writing stakes however I am sure this is probably his first blog and as such could do with a little help with understanding link love. There are plenty of references to all manner of items and stuff within the post contents but not a single hyperlink to anything. Within ‘In support of British pig farmers’ Mark even types a URL into the copy but still no hyperlink. With the assumption that this website is more than likely built on a CMS, surely it won’t take Fiona Hall, Internet Marketing Manager or one of her team long to sit with Mark and show him how to use the hyperlink/anchor function of the HTML Editor? Mark if you read this, please ask someone if you don’t know or if you do, please learn to love linking. Linking as a blog writer is your best friend. Why? Because it shows you care, it shows that you are willing to expand the user’s knowledge and it shows that you have researched wider than your own experiences. There is also added benefits to the business too, linking out to well written resources or content improves Google rankings as Google sees the business as a much more valuable resource, like a hub of information.
There are some functionality issues; there is a distinct lack of the permalink on posts leaving them susceptible to link rot and damaging to the ease of linking to from external bloggers and also another one for you Mark, linking to your own posts from a new post you are writing. Cross-referencing your posts if they are relevant to what you’ve written in the past gives the blog more value, a more rounded user experience and improved indexing by search engines.
Waitrose also appear to shy away from tagging and social bookmarking capabilities. Tagging and social bookmarking is a classification of a web resource which is carried out by humans who understand the content rather than by automated resources such as search engine spiders. For instance a recipe for strawberry mousse on the Waitrose website could be tagged: strawberry mousse, desert, recipe, Waitrose. Anyone searching for one or a combination of these tags would then be returned the resulting page along with any others that have been tagged similarly. There are no Digg this buttons, Technorati tags, bookmark this in Del.icio.us buttons or anything along these lines from the top tagging and social bookmarking websites. A quick search of Technorati, the blog search engine that most bloggers will be aware of, results in no finds for any of the Waitrose blog posts.
Having just searched Technorati, I come back to Waitrose and I notice something missing, something quite inexcusable. There are no RSS feeds for the Waitrose blogs. Why? RSS or really simple syndication is a way of aggregating blog entries into a news reader. It uses an XML format and there are a number of news readers to choose from which will retrieve new posts as soon as they are published by a website. Waitrose therefore without adopting conventional RSS techniques sits in a lead bunker attracting only the loyal custom of website traffic to read their posts. They do not aggregate nor allow easy means of following blog updates. This community will develop v–e–r–y s–l–o–w–l–y and without the dynamic that a well propagated blog should. Pity.
I would like to see at the very least the RSS problem sorted out, I would also like to see some tagging going on. Waitrose could then display blog posts by topic as well as by archive which makes searching the blogs that whole lot more usable.
The Waitrose Scrapbook
Waitrose describes the scrapbook “This tool has been designed to allow you to get the most out of our new site. The breadth of content from recipes, articles and forum can be overwhelming at times and difficult to keep track of. Your scrapbook will allow you to save elements of the site to your own personal space where you can store, organise & keep track of developments in areas of the site that interest you.” I found the scrapbook to be very helpful and a great way to explore areas of the website which I hadn’t discovered yet. So in the usability stakes this personal area which stores profile details and saved information rates very highly, especially as it provides alternative ways to traverse the site. There is a sub-navigation system within the scrapbook for scrapbook home, recipes & cookbooks, forum and articles. Within the applicable subsections stored information that the user has saved is listed and can be modified.
Recipes & Cookbooks
There is the functionality to create ones own cookbook within this subsection or multiple cookbooks for different seasons or styles if you so wish. Recipes are saved from the ‘Cooking and Recipes’ section of the website. They can be placed within a cookbook, moved from one cookbook to another or simply left outside of the filing system that the cookbook functionality gives. Each recipe may be displayed with notes, which are user created on the main recipe page, average user rating, this is star rated out of five, how long the meal takes to prepare and cook, displayed with time in minutes and a clock display icon and lastly comments from users visiting the recipe. There is more. Below each recipe listing on the user interface dashboard is a further drop down panel which shows information on ingredients and nutritional information as well as an image of the recipe. Again there is more. Above the listings at the head of the dashboard is a further drop down panel, this one allows filtering of recipes by what type of ingredients are used, for instance cheese and dairy or pork, what course it is, an example would be for the main course and also by total cooking time. There may even be more, new features seem to emerge the more recipes are added. Recipes can also be sorted alphabetically by name or chronologically by date added. This is a thoroughly usable interface, well thought out and labour intensive creating maximum ease of use. I am sure I could add some more functionality to this though without embellishment. I would suggest allowing the user to be able to star rate their own recipes too and be able to filter by such. There are also a number of very neat functions that live on the main recipes page. Being able to SMS the ingredients to your mobile phone is one. Email the recipe to a friend is another. I would add these buttons to the dashboard too; there is plenty of room available to do so without causing cluttering or diminishing usability.
Forum
The forum subsection within the scrapbook is much simpler but this is a good thing. Topics that I have decide I want to follow are listed in the dashboard with number of replies, information on the last post which includes user id, date and time of reply. There is also an RSS button, so Waitrose do know what RSS is, they’ve used it in a very unique way here though by allowing subscriptions to forum discussions. So I’ll ask again, why not for the blogs?
To the right side of the dashboard is a panel which lists links to the most recent discussions with number of replies and information on the last post with all the information found in the dashboard listings. This is all a great way of keeping track of forum activities. I have nothing to add here to improve this service.
Articles
Like the Forum everything here is simplified and this is basically a service to collate links to articles that have been found while negating the Waitrose website. I would however suggest allowing customer feedback to articles too with comments and star ratings. Then these would’ve been an addition to the dashboard articles sections along with a personal star rating as described in the ‘Recipes & Cookbooks’ subsection. I shall mention this in further detail when I review the main articles pages.
Shopping List
The shopping list grocery items are propagated automatically by adding recipes that you like to it. Check boxes appear next to each item allowing them to be removed. Additional items may also be typed in and added to the shopping separately listed under the title of ‘My additional items’. The recipes that the groceries were added from appear above the shopping list and can be removed in view of that thus deleting all items that correspond to a particular recipe. All items can also be cleared. All bases covered so far. The shopping list can be printed or emailed. Lists of new recipes for the month are added to the sidebar alongside a recipe search form and an online grocery shopping form. All are applicable to the shopping list page. Great. We have seen the use of SMS technology in other parts of the website to text recipe ingredients to a mobile phone. I would’ve liked to of seen this applied to the shopping list as well. Furthermore the shopping list is not integrated with online shopping which is a large disappointment, when I first saw the shopping list page I immediately thought this is what it was for and was excited. I understand fully why it isn’t, Waitrose deliver but they also use partners Ocado to access some areas of Britain, including where I live in Birmingham. Waitrose have a stand alone website for their delivery service and Ocado again have their own so it is unachievable at this moment in time to hook up the shopping list with these two services. I hope that Waitrose plan to do so in the future because this will knock seven shades out of the competition.
Recipes
I covered a number of the functions available within recipes when analysing the ‘Cooking & recipes’ subsection within the scrapbook and the shopping list. I will list them here as a quick reference:
- Add ingredients to shopping
- Add to scrapbook
- Email recipe to a friend
- Add a note / edit a note
- Rate recipe out of five stars
- Nutritional information
- Total time to prepare and cook
- Ingredients
There is also the ability to print, however for added functionality there are choices of A4, A5 or printing on index cards which is a nice touch. In the main body of content under the recipe and cooking instructions are cook’s tips and any notes that the user has written for the recipe personal to their own profile. Beneath this are customer comments and images. It is possible to take a snap of your creation and upload for everyone else to see. Absolutely fantastic, not one for me with the culinary skills of a GCSE student, but I can imagine additions and changes being made to the recipe and getting uploaded here by some master chefs would be thoroughly rewarding and philanthropic to the Waitrose community. In the sidebar are some neat items to improve usability and services; a glossary of terms, some of which have related videos icons beside them, a drink recommendation link and unit conversion charts that open up in popup windows. All of these provide a better user experience for the customer and I am pleased to see them all. You’ll probably notice I am not lambasting any of the recipe pages. And for good reason, they are very good! I did say this would be a tough task I was taking on. Just thought I would clarify that again. I am not bitter. Honest.
Entertaining
The entertaining section is pure genius. It provides patrons to the Waitrose website with useful information on how to plan a party and entertainments along with a choice of online invitation templates to choose from through a five step process:
- Choose a card
- Fill out your details
- Create a guest list
- Add a menu
- Preview and send out
Items like this make a website sticky and I hope that Waitrose gets a lot of success from this because although I can never see myself using it I can still see great value in supplying this conception. The clear five step process will also prevent users from dropping out early in the chain of completion and improves usability by clearly showing the user exactly where they are, where they are headed and where they have been. These are the three fundamental golden rules in a chain of events system like this, and although this is a simple example it can be applied to large multiple function systems.
There is also a canapé calculator to determine how many you’ll need for the length of party and number of guests. All very, very posh. Oh yes, quite.
Articles
I will just pick up briefly on what I mentioned in the articles section of the scrapbook that I promised I would pick up on here. I would like to of seen more user input on the articles pages, reaction, views and comments along with the star rating that was seen on the recipes. Much more user involvement would really bring these articles to life. It needn’t impinge on the quality of the articles, a star rating and user input towards the foot of the pages would more than suffice. What I do like about the articles pages is that they feel like they are part of a magazine article. The typography is beautiful with large quote marks encapsulating the whole dialogue, large images of the celebrity guest who has written the piece and blockquotes or pull quotes as they are called in design for print really make these sections vibrant with a clear sensitivity to design. The profile column for the article writer to the right-hand-side with short bullet point career highlights is just class.
Branch Finder
The branch finder allows finding nearest branches by entering town name or postcode into a text box or alternatively selecting the store by name from a drop down menu. Once this has been completed the resulting page is much more exciting. A map powered by multimap shows your location and then markers for each of the local branches in that area are labelled with numbers which increment the further from the branch you are located. I am told where my nearest branch is textually too and the distance from that store along with an address, phone number and opening hours. Other branches in my area are also listed with address and distances with links if I wish to choose one of these instead of the nearest. For the nearest store it is possible to make this my local branch which as Waitrose explains “Selecting a local branch means we can show you what deals and products are available at your local branch”. There is also a link to see full branch details.
After selecting my nearest store as my local branch I head on in to full branch details. The proceeding page has more information on shopping services, food counters and ranges, customer facilities and disability information. My favourite though and the main emphasis on the page is the local products “A product is defined as 'local' if it is made within a 30-mile radius of the Waitrose branch where it is sold. Local products in Waitrose shops include sausages, bacon, ice cream, wines and cheese - all made largely from locally produced ingredients, free from unnecessary additives and are usually delivered straight to the branch by the supplier. At present more than 1200 local products from 450 local suppliers are available in nearby branches”. Three local products are then displayed with images beneath this statement which link to the Waitrose Deliver website.
Also on this page is a zoomed in version of the multimap which provides the location of the branch and below this is a plan route form to plot your route via a start and end location. Hit the plan route button and another page propagates with a route map and written directions to get to the store along with the ability to print.
Search the site
Waitrose like many websites uses a search facility, it is found on the masthead at the top of the website. Type in your keyword or query and hit the search button. We’ve all seen them before and know how they are used. Waitrose unlike many websites has a user friendly search results page. Each result has an icon which relates to one of the five different types of information: Article, Recipe, Glossary, Branch information, Customer notices. It is also possible to filter by type by simply checking one or more of the five choices and hitting the filter button. There is also a tabbed layout in the top of the search results dashboard one for all of Waitrose.com and the other for recipes only. Unfortunately this always remains as recipes only. My first search was ‘egg’ and the majority of types fell under recipes. My second search was ‘history’ and the majority of types then were articles. It would’ve been more beneficial to me to have the recipe tabbed region turn to articles only as this was the dominant choice with recipes for this phrase becoming dormant. There is also an advanced site search and advanced recipe search facility which allows for exact phrases and removal of certain words as well as sorting by date or relevance and the amount of results you wish to see per page. This is all powered by Google and is a very comprehensive and powerful system.
Accessibility
“Waitrose.com has made a commitment to make this website accessible. This site is working towards See it Right accreditation from the RNIB.
The site is also working towards conformance to Double-A of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 1.0 (WVAG 1.0), including all Priority 1 and Priority 2 and some Priority 3 checkpoints as defined in the Guidelines. ”
As you would expect Waitrose has this covered, not to say there aren’t improvements that can be made. Hopefully I can point out a few which have been overlooked to help Waitrose work further towards that See it Right accreditation. There are a number of places within the copy where a mention of ‘click here’ can be found on hyperlinks. This is inaccessible use of link text which should always be descriptive, succinct, visually obvious and unique as laid out by the RNIB Web Access Centre and W3C. Other inaccessible link texts that I found on the Waitrose website are ‘Read more’ after every blog post, ‘here’ and ‘clicking here’ on the forum. This really is a large accessibility issue and should be rectified soon as Waitrose states that all Priority 1 and Priority 2 checkpoints will be adhered to. The WAI states in point 13.1 that link text must clearly identify the target of each link to reach Priority 2. The reason why this is so bad is because if a user is accessing the website with a screen reader and wishes to tab through the links all they will hear are constant non-descriptive elements sounding much like this “Click here, click here for more information, read more, more information”. As you can imagine this is more than infuriating.
Turning off scripting
The next test was to see how Waitrose handled scripting turned off. Not all internet users have JavaScript enabled on their browsers so scripting to form areas of a website is not to be relied upon. For those of you who wish to follow along with my observations to the website with scripting turned off please follow these instructions for your browser of choice. Otherwise you may skip these instructions.
Internet Explorer 7
- Select Tools from the toolbar to open drop down menu
- Choose Internet Options at the bottom of the menu
- The Internet Options dialogue window will open
- Select the Security tab
- Use the Custom Level button to open Security Settings
- Scroll to the Scripting section of the Security Settings
- Choose the Disable radio button under Active Scripting
- Hit OK on Security Settings to save and close the window
- Hit OK on Internet Options to save and close the window
- Reload the Waitrose website
FireFox 2
- Select Tools from the toolbar to open drop down menu
- Choose Options at the bottom of the menu
- The Options dialogue window will open
- Select the Content tab
- Ensure Enable JavaScript is not ticked
- Hit OK on Options to save and close the window
- Reload the Waitrose website
Safari 3
- Select Edit from the toolbar to open drop down menu
- Choose Preferences at the bottom of the menu
- The Preferences dialogue window will open
- Select the Security tab
- Ensure Enable JavaScript is not ticked
- Hit the close window X top right to save and close the window
- Reload the Waitrose website
Opera 9
- Select Tools from the toolbar to open drop down menu
- Choose Preferences at the bottom of the menu
- The Preferences dialogue window will open
- Select the Content from the list
- Ensure Enable JavaScript is not ticked
- Hit OK on Preferences to save and close the window
- Reload the Waitrose website
If your browser is not in the list above then you should be able to find out instructions for your browser by consulting Help from the toolbar.
Usually I wait for websites to scream at me once I have turned off scripting, usually like a wailing banshee repeating the words over and over “I’m broken! I’m broken, well done fool; you managed to really screw me up this time”. Not on Waitrose, not for now at least. This website degrades gracefully back to static content. Take a look at the home page for example where the Flash movie directly underneath the main menu once stood when scripting was enabled. It now displays one of the images from the Flash movie and all the content that was visible before is now laid out in a vertical menu with hyperlinks to each of the sections that they are marketing. How is this achieved? Through clever use of the SWF Object script which applies a Flash movie to a division on the website. When scripting is disabled whatever content is displayed within this division is shown in place of the movie. Further down the page there once proudly stood another Flash movie, this time of features and special offers. Again the same process has been applied and a tiled wall of images with applicable alternative text for screen readers is placed as alternative content. This is all very impressive stuff and well considered. The only gripe I have is that the slide numbers from the Flash movie and the arrows on either side which allow for scrolling in different directions when the movie is present are still visible. I can only imagine that these are all being populated by an external XML document which is, in brief, a way of managing objects and information. This just needs a bit of a tweak to get rid of these unnecessary and unusable items which may confuse visitors in their script disabled context.
We do get a warning appear when scripting is disabled “Many features on this site require javascript enabled & flash player” really? Well we will just have to find out how damaging to the user experience this could possibly be. Pretty bad, I move over to my scrapbook again and have a loss of functionality in the dashboard of the recipes. Those ‘Show image, ingredients and nutrition’ dashboard extensions for each recipe now return 403 errors when ever the link is used. However redeeming itself the ‘Show recipe filter’ is left open so all the check boxes in this can still be used but I would still use specific content with scripting disabled to get rid of the hyperlink on the text which still reads ‘Show recipe filter’ when it is already open.
There are other problems scattered around here and there such as the ‘WaitroseWineDirect’ and ‘Learn more about wine’ tabs within the ‘Drink’ section of the website which overlap and does not allow for height growth when scripting is disabled affectively cropping the content. Other than these few glitches which require quick ironing out, most of the website performs very well and users will be able to enjoy the majority of the content.
Usability
I have mentioned a lot of the useful usability functions that the Waitrose websites uses throughout but there are some that I have not mentioned so far which are well worth mentioning and relate to the overall structure of the site.
Breadcrumb trail
Like many websites that contain countless pages full of information, Waitrose makes use of a breadcrumb trail to signpost exactly what page you are currently browsing, whether this is in a subsection and how many levels deep from the homepage. This all takes place in a neat little panel above the main content which runs into the ‘Save article to scrapbook’ function and print page. The home button is replaced by an icon representation.
Sitemap
Waitrose understands how a web page works, web browsers are not confused by what we call the ‘fold’ which is the point below what is visible on the monitor screen when the web page is loaded. Users know that web pages are longer than this and they are not averse to scrolling. To think so is a very outdated concept of usability and this subject can be read further on at usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s website. Waitrose place the sitemap in the footer of every page unperturbed by document height and it not only looks great but also means that pretty much every page within the website is no more than two, possibly three steps away. This is usability brilliance and I would like to see more sitemaps presented in this way. In fact I will make steps to introduce this concept into my future designs and educate clients on the benefits of doing so.
External links
All external links are presented alongside the universally recognised image of an arrow with its tail inside a box and the point outside which conveys moving off site. The image holds the alternative text of ‘This link opens in a new window’ to convey this further and to provide accessibility. Adding simple features to a website like this communicates to the user exactly what is going to happen when they use this link. There will be no confusion that a new window will appear and that they will be taken to a third party website. If you can adopt these types of features for your businesses website your users will thank you.
Finally
So there we have it, a comprehensive review of the social and digital media contained in and producing the Waitrose website. I covered the blogs, forum, scrapbook, shopping list, recipes, articles, entertaining, branch finder, site search accessibility and usability. There was a lot more to talk about than I bargained for when I decided to undertake this review, there is still probably a lot more besides. When I consult on a website it never takes this format of writing on a huge wordy document with such dialogue as I have used. But it has been an interesting experience and I hope it will show how closely websites must be examined to reach a good level of usability and accessibility as well as providing a rich social and digital media experience for the users of the site. I have provided the kind of document that would be produced for Waitrose had they have been my client and this would have been backed up with a face to face consultation where I would put forward the case for my observations and recommendations to improve the service.
Waitrose, I am sure you will agree, is doing a lot right. The new website is an ambassador for good social developments which is actively seeking out user participation and building an online community which many will be proud to be part of. Only a handful of businesses can boast this ability and educating brands that this is the future of their web presence is the task that I and digital media consultants like me are tasked to do. There are clever and exciting opportunities to improve services for website users and I am looking forward to helping businesses like Waitrose to realise these dreams.