Amoeba.com IA & Usability Testing

 April 2022

Skills Used

Amoeba Usability Testing

  • Moderated Open Card Sorting

  • Site Mapping

  • Unmoderated Tree Testing

  • Wireframing in low and mid fidelity

  • Participating in Team critiques

  • Moderated Usability Testing

Overview

  • Amoeba is the world’s largest independent record store based in California. Following the pandemic Amoeba wants to improve usability of their website to better support their growing customer base and expand online sales while providing magical experiences that their loyal customers love.

Business Goals

  • Increase online sales

  • Increase in-store visitor confidence

First time customer mindsets & Goals

  • Find a unique item or music event

  • Visit store for the first time

  • Seek specific known items

  • Plan logistics for visiting stores

Moderated Open Card Sort

Prior to conducting the first usability test, I wanted to learn more about how first time customers group items within Ameoba’s current navigation system by conducting a moderated open card sort. 

From those insights I tested changes to Amoeba’s site structure, such as language used, primarily within the main navigation during tree testing.

UNMODERATED Tree Testing

Tree testing revealed problems primarily with taxonomies/ontologies that consisted of industry jargon. From this I recommended changes to the current site structure and landed on 3 main goals for usability testing.

Usability Test Goals

  1. Test the efficiency of finding COVID 19 policies to ensure first time customers feel confident visiting Amoeba stores in person

  2. Test to find out if changing the language of green room sessions to “past shows” makes bringing the Amoeba experience to the online platform more accessible to first time customers. 

    1. From the pie tree (above) you can see that first time customers had trouble finding videos of performances at Amoeba

  3. Testing the learnability of where to find products/services that Amoeba offers to its customers and what path customers prefer to take when searching for a known-item. With the goal being to increase online sales

Usability Testing INsights

Task 1

  • For my first task I had participants find out more about Amoeba’s response to COVID. I found that all users had complete success navigating to the COVID-19 policies and all of them did so via the call to action on the home page despite there being additional paths in the main nav and footer.

  • Another finding that came about was that users want to be able to interact with breadcrumbs to navigate back to previous pages.

Task 2

  • The second task tested accessibility of exploring unique experiences Amoeba offers, like videos of Green Room Sessions on their website, after changing the language to “Past Shows” in the main navigation drop down. 


  • I found that all participants had partial success in navigating to the green room session videos. All three of them first explored the Music drop down in the main nav before taking the expected path of going to Shows & Events. One participant stated that “this would definitely be in music and I would start drilling into [music] first” before then going to Shows & Events.

Task 3

  • The third task tested known item seeking behaviors by having participants find music of a specific artist. I was curious to find out what navigation structure users prefer to take and efficiency of the chosen path. The two participants who chose the Search bar did so within a few seconds of giving the task. 

  • And interestingly, the participant who chose to find Artists music via a different path stated that they “saw on the past shows [page] that they could look at their music there and shop for [the artists] stuff”. This shows that memorability of calls to action was high.

Next Steps & Recommendations

  • Keeping store policies accessible on the home page and using calls to action to build confidence of people visiting Amoeba stores for the first time.

  • Building out the Music taxonomy to also include videos of Green room sessions at Amoeba

    • Also, I’d recommend keeping more general language, such as the change of green room sessions to shows, in the main navigation cause this will help first time customers of the website find those unique experiences Amoeba offers.

  • Applying taxonomies into the search bar results by offering content filtering and conducting A/B testing to see if that increases efficiency of finding known-items.