George Rosier's portfolio & blog site

Back in 2008, I reviewed the Route One website (here). Aside from that being ages ago (time flies), I recently stumbled across the site again – they’ve undergone a redesign! That’s cause for a) celebration, and b) another review.

To recap, the main issues with the old site were:

• Crazy homepage with bonkers messages
• No hierarchy in terms of buttons, messages, actions or otherwise
• Badly-built (all in tables)
• Strange combination of design templates

So has the redesign gone well? Did they sort out those issues? Or have they become Route Bum? Read on and find out!

First impressions

At first glance, things have improved over the old site. Good start, as previously the homepage was too shouty (for want of a better word), and there was a lot of confusion. This time, the layout (in terms of where things go) is more structered and there’s a peristent top-nav to get the user to the right area.

The site has also employed the much-vaunted mega drop-down (woo! sounds like something out of a manga comic). Usability experts generally agree these are a good way of getting people into the right area quickly, so good work there too.

Deeper pages still seem a little sparse, but messaging and layout are adequate and don’t hinder the user to adding items into their basket.

However.

You knew there was going to be a ‘however’, right? However, there’s still some work to do on messaging and creative., which leads me into…

Messaging and hierarchy – homepage

The site homepage has a main promo area which cycles through 10 (at the time of writing – more on this later) creative options that advertise various things. It feels like more thought needs to go into this, as currently there’s a whole lot going on in there – especially in such close proximity to the right-hand promo area.

Here’s the homepage as a whole:

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…and here’s a 500px wide snapshot of a section from the homepage:

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I know this is one area, but it draws the eye because it’s confusing. There are brand messages mixed with retail messages – meaning the impact of both are lost somewhat.

“Mix any 2 for £40” (which, incidentally, reminds me of the creative that Game used to use on stickers in-store…) and “Free Delivery” are presumably pretty key messages as they’re drivers to make people buy…yet they are boxed in by “R1 Denims” and “Supra Footwear” creative.

Interrogating site analytics to work out visitor paths & actions will help here. If people are that desperate to find Supra Footwear, get some creative into the main promo area. If (as I suspect) they arrive and either type something in the search box or browse to a relevant section, then these messages need organising.

Key points here are:

• Prioritise: Which of these messages is the most important to the business?
• Organise: Work out which ones should be displayed. Is it appropriate for them all to be next to each other like that?
• Design: Rework some of the executions of these – they’re in a bit of a mish-mash of styles, which is confusing to the eye
• Deploy: Once the three things above have been done, deploy it
• [Optional] Test: Using something like Google Optimiser, you can test different executions of creative on homepages quite easily to see which one drives the better results
• Rinse & repeat as required

Also…10x creative options on the homepage? I don’t reckon any visitors will (intentionally) see any of them past #2 or #3 – unless it’s been coded to be random (which it hasn’t at the time of writing).

This is a) a wasted effort for Route One, since coming up with 10x creative options each week/month/2 months is a pain, and b) will most likely just increase site load times. Since Google is looking to start rating sites on load time, it’s probably worth optimising this as much as possible.

E-Commerce trustmark

I’m giving this one it’s own little section, because it’s something I’m particularly interested in.

Route One are making use of an E-Commerce ‘trustmark’ – an image provided by a 3rd party that is meant to increase customer trust that a site is safe to use and do business with online. In this case, it’s been provided by Comodo. This currently sits on the homepage, but quite away near the bottom.

My issues are thus:

• Don’t hide it: If you’re going to use a trustmark, don’t hide it away
• Use it in a relevant area: As an extension to the above, use it where it’s most needed – at the checkout stage
• Who are Comodo? Why should I trust them over anyone else? Perhaps using someone like Verisign is a better idea. But the crux of the argument is…
• …their use is debatable: eConsultancy have run a couple of articles about the use of these trustmarks, and whether they’re worthwhile or not. The takehome? They’re not. Make sure your checkout journey is infallible – that will increase trust more than any graphic will.

As a parting shot on the subject, a company in the USA was recently fined by the FCC for purporting to offer dynamic trustmarks – when actually they did fuck-all and were just ripping off the sites that purchased them. Story here.

Messaging and hierarchy – product page

Here’s a screegrab of a product detail page:

Click to enlarge

Sparse, but the messages are clear. This is good. You can mouseover the image of the product and it magnifies it, which is also good. The main foible is that, whilst I like the functionality – it’s not immediately obvious: I only found out about it by accidentally hovering over the shoe for a second. This is a useful feature, so mention it somewhere!

I would also seriously debate the value of the cross-sell/tell-a-friend box. This is only:

• Taking up space: this is the fault of the execution rather than the principle. Cross-selling is a key method of increasing sales, but this isn’t really the way to do it because it’s MASSIVE. This space could be much better used.
• Distracting: How many people tell their friends about these DC Fitz skate shoes? Again, the principle is sound, but it should perhaps be more subtle.
• Duplicated: the ‘Add This’ button is already on the page which allows people to share it via Twitter/Facebook…does it really need an email option too? Perhaps choose one or the other.
• Takes a while to load: My browser (latest version of Firefox) takes ages to load the page. Whilst doing so, the Email a friend fields and the cross-sell box are all on one page:

Click to enlarge

Moving on from that, the way the site informs a user when something’s been added to the basket is good: an overlay that’s non-intrusive, but informative.

Navigation & technical

As mentioned above, the top nav is a mega drop-down, which is good. Getting deeper into the site, I also like the search/refinement options on the left: these really help users to drill down to exactly the item they’re after:

Technically, the site has also improved a lot: screenreaders should have a much better time of getting through the content here, and tables appear to have been abolished! Nice work.

My only gripe is a non-informative URLs: “www.routeone.co.uk/Store/product-is-45726″ doesn’t mean anything to anyone. However, you can use mod-rewrite to get round this and make these sensible/legible. This will also help in natural search results.

Conclusion

It’s definitely an improvement on the last site, and clearly a lot of work has gone into improving a whole bunch of issues that were present beforehand. However, there’s clearly still work to be done – though these feel more ‘executional’ (and therefore easily solved) than ‘site-critical-everythings-gonna-blow-up’, as it was last time!

P.s: No favicon either…tut tut.