Amazon (UK)

source: good e-reader

Product Description

Amazon is a multinational e-commerce company that sells anything from books to clothes to furniture. It is the largest online retailer in the world, and has separate retail websites for United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Japan, and China. It also provides international shipping to countries that do not have an Amazon component. This evaluation will focus on the UK website.

Target population
The website's target audience is people who enjoy shopping online, have a credit card or Paypal account, and are comfortable with disclosing personal information on the internet.

Match Between System and Real World
Originally, this evaluation was going to be done on the Australian branch of the Amazon website. However, it was soon revealed that the URL http://www.amazon.com.au redirects to Amazon's UK site instead (http://www.amazon.co.uk). This is confusing, because while Australia is part of the Commonwealth, it is not remotely geographically close to Australia. This is a huge concern, because Amazon is a shopping website, and that involves exchange of currency and shipping of items. The UK uses a different currency and is roughly 15,000kms away from Australia, so this is a major issue for Australian users who wanted to go to the Australian branch of Amazon -- which we know now does not exist.

What would have been helpful is if instead of automatically redirecting to the UK site automatically, Amazon could have issued a warning that the page was going to redirect, or leave some instructions on how to shop internationally on the UK website. Instead, the automatic redirect leaves users feeling slightly confused, and possibly unwilling to shop at Amazon in the future.

Consistency and Standards/Accessibility
One of the biggest issues facing the web today is accessibility of websites. While there is no way to police web standards for every website, there are online tools to evaluate website accessibility. 

Using the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool, it was determined that the Amazon UK website is not very accessible, particularly to people who need to use screen readers. Two big overall violations of web accessibility that Amazon.co.uk commits is in the metadata; it is missing a first level heading, and the document language is not specified. Both of these violations makes it harder for screen readers to read the content of the page, and lack of document language does not make the website accessible for translators. The latter may not be a massive issue, because Amazon does have specific websites for different countries, but it still poses as a major accessibility concern.

Another large violation of web accessibility rules is that none of their images have alternative text. Again, this is an issue that affects people using screen readers, but it also affects people with slower internet connections who may not want to load images.

Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
The website's homepage is a basic two-column layout primarily with black text on a white background. This design is relatively clean and allows the user to focus on the main content of the page. 

However, on a larger screen, the "Shop by Deparment" automatically shows up as a floating third column, and clutters the page up considerably. Hovering over any option on the "Department" menu opens up another menu to the right, which creates more clutter and just looks messy. This is accentuated by the fact that not all the pop-up menus are the same size, so that if the user was scrolling their mouse up and down the menu, the inconsistencies would be obvious and ugly.

Help and Documentation
A help section can be found on the footer of every page, as is consistent with the general website format. The help options it offers are: 

• Delivery Rates and Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns are Easy
• Manage Your Kindle
• Help

The help list appears to be organised in order of most popular help topics, and each one links to a separate page with dealing specifically with the topic it specifies. The first and last items on the list link to generic help sections with "most popular" help topics on the top of the page, accompanied by a search bar. Breaking the help sections down in this way makes it easier for users to find the topic they are looking for, and minimises any confused clicking around.

The middle three topics link to pages specific to either Amazon Prime, Returns, or Kindles. It is very straightforward and direct so that people looking for help on these topics are able to find what they want straight away, without having to click around on a generic help page.

Conclusion

The Amazon UK website violated more rules than it adhered to -- especially when it came to accessibility, which is disappointing considering that it is an international company that operates mainly online.