Thanks for all the comments, everybody. I know I have stayed oddly quiet about this, but it was intentional. I was waiting to see if any more constructive comments were posted. One comment in particular I thought was brilliant and it kept me up most of the night planning a new addition to the site. I am going to keep mum about it for now because I need to discuss it with our developer.
Regarding the likes and dislikes of the new site, I knew most people from PG would not like it. That is why all the user testing and design reviews we had done prior to building it were done with Internet users unfamiliar with the original design. For the most part, when people are used to and happy with something, change is rarely ever good. So in order to test usability and improvements, we had to use brand-new site visitors (several hundred over the last year) to compare old and new functionality and design.
This is a very brief overview of the primary changes.
Problems with the old site:
Navigation was a big problem. All category pages were hard coded, so it was nearly impossible to develop and maintain new categories and link them together with breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs tell you where you are, where you were and where you are going - one of the most important aspects of web usability. With the new design, there is complete flexibility in navigation. Our site got an 'F' for navigation until Christmas, when we added some navigation for visitors who did not know the difference between an akoya pearl and a freshwater. That improved it somewhat. Prior to that, our site really only welcome strongly pearl-educated customers and shunned most shoppers just looking for a strand of pearls.
Comparing
this new page with
this old page, it is easy to see the difference in the navigation structure.
In the new design, we are able to separate all products into 21 different categories, still leaving room for more categories to be added and include pearl information regarding the type - all within one page or "fold" (no scrolling).
In the old design, we were limited to seven categories due to space, and it took more than two folds. And I know it may be hard to believe, but most people browsing a site do not scroll.
In attempting to add more options like we did to
this category of the old site, one of the primary complaints we received was that the page became too cluttered - it was broken into 14 categories. The
new page has about 25, and room for more - without more than a single fold.
The point about "room for more" is important for us. In the past, we have limited the number of designs and styles because of the amount of room we had - we could not break things up into categories like double strands, triples, ropes, etc. Now we can add hundreds of new styles and the site will never become too cluttered. So we are now getting ready to add a lot of new styles, and we will no longer need to "sit" on product, waiting for space to free up (like we always have with Tahitians and South Sea strands).
In regards to the category images, the comments are correct. They are a bit too small. We have actually been working to install a sort of hover-over function that will show a larger image. This was in the original design, but testing showed us that it confused people who were used to simply clicking on a picture to see the actual product. We had to change the design sort of "last minute" because of that, so the pictures are still set at small. We wanted to go with full-scale images because pages like
this one on the old site failed miserably in user testing because it was difficult to tell what the products were.
On to the detail pages...
In the past, we have had very little control over the functionality of these pages. Adding too much information pushed the "add to cart" buttons below the fold (big usability faux pas), and it took
2.5 folds as shown here, to show limited information.
The
new version here shows everything within a single fold, allows for a lot more photo options, and allows us to give a lot more information and answer the most common questions we receive every day. The alternate views allows for close-up photos and bust shots.
The only issue we have run into on these detail pages is that several people from our test groups could not find or understand the "What is This?" that enables a hover-over graphic. We are still working on that one.
There are still quite a few cosmetic tweaks we are putting into place. It will be while before everything is complete. One large tweak is adding a bit of white space between the items in the search results (which also powers the category pages).
But so far, we are very happy with the changes. Our usability and navigability score, to put it in layman's terms, went from about a three to an eight, and conversions jumped dramatically from the first day - before any sale went live.
That was the biggest test. We could have waited a bit longer to work out all the bugs, but the extensive testing we had done showed that it would be very worthwhile to launch as soon as the site was presentable.
The pictures with chocolate are just sort of a "fun" thing for moment. Those pages are going to be the primary landing pages for our PPC campaigns, so they are in place until our new SEM team can start testing different graphics and copy.
So anyway, that was a brief overview without getting into too much detail (the detail is about 200 pages of small type and graphics). Things will continue to change over the next month or so while we make adjustments, and comments and suggestions are always,
absolutely welcome.
