The website and the user:
For this assignment, I chose RockAuto.com (https://www.rockauto.com/) and challenged a 40-something male coworker to find a part that I know he needed to fix his driver side door. With just that information provided, I watched as he went to the site. This is not someone with any real mechanical experience, just enough to jumpstart a car, and has never done his own oil change. When he needs something from the parts store, he asks the clerk behind the counter. He does have experience in IT, so navigating a website should not be a challenge.
The interaction:
He went straight to the list of car makes on the left side of the screen, but thought it was odd that the list didn’t have a title, like “Make” or “Manufacturer”. After finding “Kia” he clicked it and it expanded to all the model years, where he selected 2013. It showed two engine types (but three existed for that year). At this point there was some digging because he could not figure out what to call the part, which was the part that holds the door open, but it was not the hinge.
After about five minutes of searching various sections for door parts, he gave up and went looking for an exploded view of the door to try to find out what the part was called. It looked like it was called a door check, but when he went back to the RockAuto site, a search for door check for his model only showed some pins and some rubber straps. At that point he gave up on the site.
The findings:
The experience went south once he realized he didn’t have a correct name for the part, then could not find a way to identify the part. The site would have benefited from exploded views of the car that could be referenced for part names. In this case, he had to refer to diagrams from other sites, only to come back to RockAuto and still not find what he needed.
Had he been a true “car guy” or expert mechanic, he might have been able to properly identify the part and get by without the drawings. As a novice user, having a way to pick the part from a drawing and have the part identified would be a great advantage. The site may be missing out on sales for that simple reason. If you end up having to go to another site to identify the part, you run the risk of losing the sale to that other site.