The user spent eight minutes and thirty-nine seconds to do the task but she did not complete it. She kept on clicking the wrong links and still could not find the best science book of last year. I recorded the user’s comments by the video record pro for iOS. By preparing this activity, I had tried to observe and rehearse by navigating this website myself. During this activity, apart from observing the user’s speech, I also noticed her facial expressions when she interacted with the computer. We can measure the user’s emotions when they interact with a computer by six core expressions – sadness, happiness, disgust, fear, surprise and anger, we can also observe the degree of engagement of the user when she browsed at the online shopping site (Preece, Rogers and Sharp 2015, p.144). The think-aloud technique is an effective way of understanding the user’s experience because we can understand the user’s expectation not only from the designer’s point of view; and the user’s point of view, but we can also investigate the positive and negative outcomes of the website in an objective way. The only problem I found when conducting this activity was the user might not say out loud everything she was thinking and trying to do. In this case, I tried to observe the user’s action and emotion by taking down notes and recapping the scenes, such as which link she wanted to click and what problems she encountered. In the future, if I conducted the data gathering activity again, I would spend more time explaining the procedures in performing the think-aloud technique to the volunteer so that he or she can better understand the goal of the task.

After I analysed the data, I found eight codes which were revealed from the user’s comments. The user felt the Amazon website was quite cluttered with ambiguous link labels in its large navigation menu, she also found the systems lack of sufficient information to let the user know what to do, which eventually did not meet the user’s expectation, thus, other adverse feelings such as confusion, frustration and disappointment would also arise. I found some design concepts of Amazon web site could also be improved. Firstly, the accessibility is not presented well in the website because of the cluttered page layout, large navigation menus, ambiguous link labels and lots of categories. Preece, Rogers and Sharp (2015) indicated that designing a website that is suitable for different people such as the disabled and elderly is a key principle of web accessibility. The lack of accessibility in this webpage was revealed from the user’s comments at 02:40, the user said that the menu was quiet complicated for a first timer and was not very user friendly. Secondly, if websites reach usability goals successfully, this could satisfy the user’s perspective and make them enjoy the website (Preece, Rogers and Sharp 2015, p.19). In this case, usability goals such as effectiveness, efficiency, utility, learnability and memorability are not satisfied well, because the user seemed unhappy given that her expectations were not met. Besides that, the system did not provide sufficient information to let her know what to do, which led her to keep on clicking wrong links and failed to complete the mission over eight minutes. Lastly, the user felt frustrated because her expectations were not met. The other reason of frustration was that the websites did not provide sufficient information to enable the user to know what to do (please refer to 01:40, 02:20, 02:40 and 05:45). The user spent a lot of time to find out the correct link when operating the system, she then needed to start all over again when she made a mistake.

In conclusion, the user experienced hardship in navigating the website and failed to find the best science book of last year. Overall, this website was not constructed very well in term of the uses of concepts of accessibility and usability goals which made the user encounter hardship in navigating and thus feel frustrated. Although the website is actually quite useful and contains a lot of information, it is not suitable for first timer who has less experience with computers and navigation of the internet. Overall, the website can be improved in accessibility by changing the presentation of page layout and menus to be simpler and reducing the ambiguous link labels to let different kinds of people immediately interacting with the website. It can also improve the effectiveness and efficiency in usability by providing sufficient information to prevent the users from spending time restarting the web search when they make a mistake. Thereby it can reduce the causes of the user’s frustration and thus to enhance the user’s expectation.