A review of the new Schuh.co.uk site!

October 12, 2009 in All posts, review

In the latest part of the on-going saga of my reviewing the Schuh website(s), they’ve relaunched their website today! So, without further ado…

A review of the new www.schuh.co.uk site

After my previous entries about the Schuh sites, you may recall some of the previous points:

• Ineffective design templates
• Bad site structure, both technically and IA-wise
• Bizarre graphics
• Inconsistent user journey
• Lack of hierarchy

Have they addressed these issues? Does the site now support the brand adequately? And – perhaps most importantly – do they stock those Dekline shoes I wanted all those months ago? Read on!

First impressions
So, a look at the new homepage and…it looks better than it did. The mens/womens sections have been defined well, and it’s certainly easier on the eye. In terms of design, the promo boxes on the right do compete somewhat with the content in the main promo boxes though.

There’s some good work in getting the bulk of the content above the page fold – though the header does feel a little cramped if I’m honest. I know you can’t have everything, but still.

I must say that the flyout top navigation menu is not ideal. Whilst it’s been made in such a way that it is accessible, it’s too easy to accidentally roll the mouse over it, which then suddenly covers the homepage content. Also the layout of the content within the flyout seems really spaced out: the text is too small and there’s too much whitespace. If this could be trimmed down somewhat, I think it might be less intrusive.

Talking briefly of accessibility, the title on the accessibility page is not accessible in terms of colour contrast. A good place to start when looking at colour contrasts is HP’s Colour Contrast Verification tool, and at the moment things are not looking too great. This is an easy change though.

I rather like the way the ‘recently viewed’ products has been brought into the page layouts. This works much better than before.

The ‘View All Brands’ section is looking good, and it’s very easy to see where things are – though at first glance the ‘Sale’ section looks a bit unstructured compared to the rest of the pages. There’re lots of ways to search, all of which are presented close together and feel a bit cluttered. Which leads me nicely on to…

Design & layout:
Onto the look & feel! I appreciate a fair bit of this could be considered personal preference, but generally speaking there’s a vast improvement on previous versions. Space is used better, and there’s more consistency. However…(you knew there’d be some things, right?):

• There’s still a fair few fonts used on the homepage…
• When in a product detail page, the squared-off ‘view all images’ tab sits jarringly with the rounded-off content container.
• Where there’s use of ‘>>’ to indicate action buttons, why not use ‘»’ instead? They look neater.
• The right-nav is still very full of small text – all of which I’m sure is important, but it needs working on a little as currently there’s a lot of stuff in there.
• The checkout still feels a little distant design-wise from the main brochureware – though much better than the difference previously.
• Staying with the checkout journey, I like the way it will allow you to skip registration and get straight into paying. Also, the use of ‘Go to secure checkout’ messaging is a good reassurance for customers. More could perhaps be made of the Verisign accreditation though?
• Last thing about the checkout journey (I promise): the logo doesn’t go back to the homepage like the rest of the pages.
• I like the use of customer reviews! This kind of reinforcement is also good for getting customers into the purchase cycle.
• The persistent shopping basket in the top right of the layout is good too, if a little small.

One other thing I’d say is that the Store finder doesn’t work in IE 6…but to be honest, IE 6 should die a slow death in an alley, so let’s not worry about that.

Structure:
Technically, it’s doing better this time around, with properly-structured pages and sections. This will pay dividends in terms of searchability. But all is not rosy yet.

There seems to be a bit of confusion over which URL people should be using: the promotional teaser stuff says Schuh.co.uk, but the old site (schuhstore.co.uk) still exists: I don’t know whether this is because different sites serve different countries, but ideally that old site needs to be 301 redirected to the new site, as you don’t want Google penalising for duplicate content…and you also want to ensure that any link equity built up in the old URLs is passed over.

::UPDATE::
I suspect something is happening with the old Schuhstore URL, as at the time of writing it was doing all sorts of bizarre things. This is good.

There’s also lots of content in the main site that’s still referencing http://peep.schuh.co.uk…is this intentional? Again, care needs to be taken if this isn’t where you want to be building search equity.

Final comments:
My lunchtime is running out, and I should really eat something. Here’s my final thoughts on the new site though:

• Definitely better than before
• Spacing feels like it needs work
• Horrible flyout top nav (might be just my prefence though!)
• Product detail pages are better
• Structure is better
• Confusion over URLs

Still no Deklines, though I think I prefer the Onitsuka Tigers these days. Maybe an excuse to test the purchase journey end-to-end…?

Tags: design, new site, review, schuh