George Rosier's portfolio & blog site

Firstly, apologies for the silence: Real Life seems to be happening, and Twitter has taken a backseat – as have reviews. Anyway: I’m back!

I was recently looking at flights to Greece, and as part of my research phase I visited the ubiquitously-orange EasyJet site…and I bet you can guess what’s coming up next! Yup – Review Time! God, my life’s incredible.

How did it fare? Do the bargain-basement brand values carry through to their site? Read on and find out!

Disclaimer: I’ve used false dates for the purposes of this review – so don’t bother coming to my house to steal my pants on the dates shown in the screenshots. I will be in, and will summarily execute underwear thieves. Unless you come bearing fig rolls, in which case you’ll be robbed of them first – and then executed. Understood? Good.

Another disclaimer: If you don’t like the colour orange, don’t read this article.

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I am a long-time user of Firefox, and generally think it to be a good browser. I’ve toyed with Google Chrome, but generally find myself coming back to Firefox.

As such, I recently updated my version of Firefox to 3.6. Having successfully upgraded, I am taken to this page:

Click to enlarge

(http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/whatsnew/)

How pretty! It proudly tells me:

Thanks for supporting Mozilla’s mission of encouraging openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web!

It’s here that I start to have issues (other than the ones you are abundantly aware of).

Issue 1:

How exactly have I “supported Mozilla’s mission of encouraging openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web!”? Because I’ve updated my browser? Feels like Mozilla are disappearing up their own sockets.

Issue 1a:

In addition to the above, if you click the link for ‘Mozilla’s mission’, you’re taken to a page that explains who they are and what they do. Point #2 on that page says:

We’re a public benefit organization

dedicated not to making money but to improving the way people everywhere experience the Internet.

Um: so what about all that kick-back revenue Mozilla get from Google by having them as the default search engine for Firefox?

Issue 3:

From a web usability angle, this is the bigger one. On this ‘update’ page, the user is informed they can choose from over 35,000 themes for Firefox. At first, you think “That’s awesome!”

And then you mouseover some of these themes to try them out – only to realise that, for anyone other than a basic user with no bookmarks on their toolbar, or any toolbar extensions – the majority are unusable. Check out the screenshot below of how one of these themes looks on my version of Firefox with various extensions:

Click to enlarge

How is that any use to anyone?!

Rant over.

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!

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Travelling a fair distance (120+ miles) each day getting to and from work means the train is really the only method of transport that works for me. As such, I am a regular visitor to the National Rail site (www.nationalrail.co.uk), and have been for a number of years.

Predictably (why else would I be mentioning it?), they’ve recently relaunched it – so I thought I’d share my views of it with you. Does it do the job it sets out to do? Have they taken a step back? Read on!

(Ok so I accept I’m late to the party with this one because eConsultancy have already written an excellent review of the new site – but I’m going to try hard to differentiate, just so you don’t get bored…)

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My car tax is due, and I received a letter to remind me. How nice. In doing so, it led me to the www.direct.gov.uk site, where I can renew it online.

This shitty task got me thinking: “Why don’t I review this site?”…so here you go! Read on to find out what I thought of the site as a whole. Or is that ‘hole’? I dunno.

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