1 website, 15 minutes, 12 errors - Bugs part 3
This is another bug test that I did as a part of my blog about bugs and system errors. If you missed the first part where I look at issues on a more general level, you can read the blog here. In this blog, I’ll take a look at a website and give myself 15 minutes to find issues in the user journey or website functionality.
Clinique HK website
Clinique is a part of Estée Lauder and according to Statista, is valued at around $6 billion worldwide. They manufacture and sell cosmetics. I am in this case looking at their Hong Kong online store in English.
I tested the site functionality briefly with Chrome for about 4 minutes, then tested the same with Firefox and Edge, and finally spent 3 minutes testing using Chrome on Android. Here are the bugs or issues I found in 15 minutes. I also added screenshots to better visualize the issues.
DESKTOP
Quick shop variant selector does not work - If you want to pick a size of the product between 30, 50, or 100ml, this is not possible. This happened on all browsers on desktop.
The words shopping cart and bag are used randomly. The website says “Add to bag” and once clicked, it says “Item added to cart”
The short description of the item is too long so it hides add to cart below the fold
When proceeding from the cart page to checkout, the message was shown only in Chinese
Firefox had the same page show both English and Chinese but these had an issue with alignment
Account optional… or is it? This is not a bug but a design flaw. The only way to proceed without creating an account is to not tick the box about understanding terms & conditions.
MOBILE:
The newsletter subscription banner welcoming customers crops part of the text so you cannot read what you accept by clicking submit
The banners on mobile are not responsive so they crop parts of the image and the countdown timer
On search, the search bar has alignment issues
When proceeding to the checkout, my language changed to Chinese
On the cart page the page does not allow scrolling properly so it was not possible to read the whole page or e.g. see the footer
After proceeding from the cart page to checkout, the page completely breaks down and has at least 3 bugs on the same screen: The header messages don’t load correctly but show all of the messages at once, the popup overlay is not responsive and you cannot scroll down
My verdict on Clinique
I did not set out to find a website with a lot of flaws. In addition to the above issues that I found in 15 minutes, the website had other problems ranging from slow page load times to confusing messages to missing meta information for SEO. The basics are there, but most of the areas, especially on mobile are so poorly built that if I had to put an estimate to it, Clinique is losing as much as 50% of its potential sales through the website.
Perhaps the website is rather new or the market itself is not as important, but it would be interesting to know what a more thorough, one-day investigation into the usability of the site would reveal.