Learn the Usability when looking for an Import Book on Gramedia Book Store
Gramedia Web App — Research Study Case
Research Background
Gramedia is one of the oldest book stores that has been around for a longer time in the form of a conventional book store. It is in the Department mall or even has their store as they had already done in Surabaya. However, as time goes by and the acceleration of digital apps and websites grows rapidly, Gramedia has been well-tried to follow its trend by launching its own Online Book store via the Website on Gramedia.com and the mobile apps that are available on the App Store and Play store. One of the specialties of Gramedia is by providing a great book with the Bahasa Indonesia as the base of the book language so everyone who did not understand English could also learn by reading it.
However, these days, Gramedia also release and brings an import book into their store, which is a book with an English as the literature instead of Bahasa Indonesia because we look at the trend of a lot of younger people had already understood about English and the demand of an import book has been rising these days. They also added these imported books to their website so they also could buy them through their home. Hence in this research, we would like to discover if the import book can be found easily on the website to improve it more for the next iteration of the website development and uncover the pains of our users when they are trying to find an import book.
What’s my role in this research?
In this research project, I work as one of the UX researchers with Mbak Belinda and Mbak Vaya because we are on the same team called Kelompok 4. We divided our roles into Note Taker, moderator, and observer.
What would we like to learn from this research?
There are three objectives that we would like to learn from this research there is consist of :
- Learn their behavior when looking for a book on the Gramedia Website
- Learn their challenges when looking for an English Literature Book on Gramedia Website
- Discover their needs that would increase their efficiency when looking for an English Literature Book on Gramedia Website
What kind of Research Question would you like to cover up all this research?
After we came up with the objectives, we tried to break down the purposes into several research questions that we would like to cover to answer the research objectives. Here are some research questions that we came up with:
- How’s their behavior when looking for a book using a Gramedia Website App?
- How easy or difficult is it for them to find an English Literature book on the Gramedia website?
- What challenges did they face when looking for an import book using a Gramedia Website?
- What is their need to make finding books in Gramedia, especially for an English book, easier than the existing one?
So, How do we conduct the research?
In this research, we mainly would like to see their behavior to perform some task to know whether it’s easy or not to do so. We use a behavioral research method, Usability testing. Using Usability testing allows us to see their behavior and their reason behind doing it and explain its use, whether it is easy or not, and the reason behind it. In this research project, we use moderated usability testing so the data can be gathered. Qualitative data: We invited three participants interested in reading a book online and usually looked for a book in e-commerce instead of coming to a bookstore. Because it’s a qualitative research method, we could not be able to satisfy or validate the whole population of Gramedia users. Still, we could discover the reason as insight and evidence.
Then What kind of insight do we get from the research?
- Participants tend to have difficulty looking for an Import Book because they tend to look for the book using a search bar to make it easier. The search filter and the catalog filter did not provide a filter for a language, so they found it hard to find the book.
When the UT begins, participants find it challenging to find the import book because they tend to look at the text on the filter after the catalog has been chosen, such as “Self Development.” They are confused because the filter does not provide a language filter, so they wander around only to look for the book in the self-development catalog, and it is quite challenging to find it.
“kebingungan gimana cara nya untuk memilih buku dengan konten berbahasa inggris karena gak ada filter membuat kita untuk memilih kontennya itu atau mau bahasa yang lain gitu”
P1, Like to read a Book via an online website.
- Participants tend to look for the book using the search bar because they expected that using a search bar could search directly for the book they would like to look for and find the English literature more efficiently using the keyword.
Participants tend to use the search bar with the expectation that they could find it more efficiently using a keyword without searching it on each menu on the Website. However, even using the search bar, they could not find the book easily because there are no keywords that match the import book, and also, there is no filter for language after the search result is shown up.
“Kebingungan, mencari2 tentang pengembangan diri. ketik keyword pengembangan diri di bagian search. setelah mencari 2, belum nemu yang bahasa inggris.”
P2, Like to read books and order a book through E-Commerce.
So What Could We do to help the Participant to solve their problem?
- Put the import book on the search menu list and Add a filter functionality on the filter menu after searching using a search bar as well as in the catalog menu for Language filter for the book so our users could also find the import book more easily without having to enter the different menu.
We knew that the issues with finding an import book were because the import book had a different menu, and they could not find the book using the search bar because there is no filter available on the catalog after searching it using the search bar. So to help that, we could put the import book available on the search menu and add a language filter on the filter features to look at the book more easily and make it noticeable even when they are looking at the book using the search bar.
- Add some Language information on the Catalog Card, whether it is an English or Bahasa Indonesia book, so our users can differentiate the book more easily without clicking the catalog cards.
We knew that the lack of information about the language of the book that had been displayed made it difficult for the participant to find the English literature book. So to help our users, we could put some language information on the catalog card so our users could differentiate the book without having to click the catalog cards first, making the bounce rate on the book page lower than before.
What did I learn from this research?
Through this research, I learned a lot about conducting proper Usability Testing, especially a moderated one. Creating a research question that aligns with the objective creates a scenario that isn’t leading and confusing for the participant to follow. I also learned the art of creating a scenario that is easy to follow and remember—analyzing and making a recommendation based on the screen of the UT that our participant pass-through is also new to me to do that analysis.
