Google Analytics

Assignment: Analytics

Brief: Find design opportunities in the Google Merchandise Store based on Google Analytics
Materials: Google Analytics
Team: Individual
note: I redid this assignment for a re-exam in November of 2021.

Analyzing the Analytics

Quality of data is very important. I wanted to use 2 years of data to compare but those sets are very hard to evaluate as there are very different in revenue. 2020 had a revenue of $54k versus the 2021 revenue of $1.6 million. I will have to use the 2021 data only. There also seems to be some irregularities with the February sales dropping drastically to then just come back in March. I will not try to find insights in that part of the dataset.

A chart showing revenue in Google Analytics

Noteworthy data

Design for mobile first

The industry standard is to design for mobile first as this will seldomly harm any desktop usage but the other way around can often lead to problems. This is even more true than in 2010 when responsive web design was invented as mobile traffic is the dominant traffic on most sites, on this particular site mobile traffic is low but that could be caused by the design. As mobile traffic seems to under perform on the site I would suggest further research into why.

Some problems I can find right away is that the site is abysmally slow. Google lighthouse gives it a 23 out of 100 in performance with a 22.6 from start until you can interact with the site. Funnily they also score very low (50) on search engine optimization.

I think the start page has potential for improvement. One problem is the auto-scrolling carousel at the top, auto-scrolling is not a great UI-pattern and the manual navigation is bad. Today, I would expect a better navigation than having to click small dots under the carousel, I would want clicks on the sides on the carousel and swipes. The navigation is even worse on mobile as the expectation to be able to swipe is higher and the small dots are bad targets for taps.

The click targets on the product cards are very small, just a link instead of the whole card, making mobile navigation harder. None of the high performing products are pushed on the home page, instead we get some "trending" categories. Nothing in the analytics data shows that these products are trending.

With almost 200 network requests on a simple product page, it's no wonder that it is slow. Megabytes of javascript gets loaded just to show a very simple page that should be light and fast to load. Performance is also part of UX and especially on mobile. It's not ok to load almost 4mb of compressed data just to show a page with 1 medium image and 7 thumbnails.