Feedback Friday 2: Puddleducks take the plunge

February 6, 2009 · Posted in Feedback Friday 

puddle-ducks-outdoor-clothi2Last week we kicked off the Feedback Friday feature with Pressieport.ie. I don’t mind telling you that the post was the most popular on this blog in the last month and the feedback Fred Schelbaum received was second to none. Not long after the post went live I got an email from Fred with the subject line, “WOW!” so he was very happy too. So well done to all the commenters and Twitterers who helped out.

This week our featured site for Feedback Friday is Puddleducks. Aedan Ryan, director of Puddleducks, sent me the following to help you fabulous feedbackers:

PuddleDucks is an online retailer of outdoor clothing clothes for children and adults. Our best selling items are the waterproof dungarees, jackets and suits for younger children.

What I would like to achieve from Feedback Friday is to get feedback and make improvements to our Home Page so we can try to reduce the bounce rate from visitors to the site.

Therefore I’d appreciate feedback on some of the following:

  • initial impression of our Home Page
  • layout of the Home Page
  • is it easy to know how to progress from the home page to start shopping on the site?
  • are there any other design improvements we could make to the home page or the product pages?
  • any other ideas on how to make shopping easier or encourage visitors to purchase

We’d also like to offer a 10% discount to all readers for any purchases until Sunday 8th Feb. Just use the discount coupon “iia12″. Please note that you need to be registered as a user on the site before you can redeem the coupon.

Thanks very much in advance for your feedback.

Again please keep the guidelines in mind when giving feedback and most of all, thanks very much!

Tags: , , , , ,

Comments

13 Responses to “Feedback Friday 2: Puddleducks take the plunge”

  1. Leon Quinn on February 6th, 2009 1:16 pm

    Here you go Aedan:

    Home page looks ever so slightly busy to me and not sure about the mix of colors, especially the green on New and Featured products.

    Not sure about the main links top left, left aligned might be better.

    On my large monitors, your background cloud image stops abruptly so you might want to make that wider or repeatable.

    The small text at the bottom under the heading – “PuddleDucks – shop online” is hard to read and obviously there just to offer good keyword links for google. Don’t try any tricks to please google!

    Keeping the logos bottom left, left aligned would be better too.

    Apart from those small things, the site is a lot better than most I’ve seen! Well done.

  2. frankp on February 6th, 2009 2:46 pm

    Hi Aedan,

    I would agree with Leon above that the site looks busy – there are too many items with equal visual weight vying for attention.

    When one attempts to go through the page blue band leads the visually to “Home – About Us – Deliver – Contact” first, but from your perspective I imagine these should not be the primary focus.

    I would look at simplifying your page and creating a visual hierarchy which communicates quickly what you do and leads to items for sale faster.

    Also, your homepage doesn’t communicate to me immediately that I can buy online, I would look at some existing conventions to get this across.

    For example clear images and prices of your best selling items with ‘more info’ + ‘buy now’ buttons.

    Hope this is helpful,
    Best,
    Frank

  3. Aedan on February 6th, 2009 2:54 pm

    Hi Leon – great feedback Thanks a lot — Aedan

  4. Fred - Pressieport on February 6th, 2009 3:30 pm

    Hi Aedan,

    Well done on your bravery in submitting the site to Feedback Friday. I hope you get as much as I did from it.

    I had a scan through the site and tried a couple of things with it. Functionally, it seems to work well and the structure seems good.

    I do find the mixture of colours a bit off-putting in that they don’t necessarily blend or match with the primary colours (ie: those in your logo) – I think I found about 8-9 colours excluding those used in graphics/icons etc..

    Your product categories looked to me at first as if they were actually part of your banner (might be just me). I would consider splitting banner and Categories into 2 distinct areas so as to make it clear to the user.

    The totally different style of the grey menu below the categories clashes a bit (background and font colours) and I couldn’t help but feel that some of these items would have been better placed in a footer area.

    Apart from that, you can tell that you’ve put a lot of time and effort into keeping the site ‘alive’ (Twitter, blog, Facebook, pictures etc..)

    I hope this helps a bit and that I didn’t sound overly critical :-)

    Have a great weekend.

    Fred

  5. Keith Shirley on February 6th, 2009 3:38 pm

    Firstly – thanks for the clear indication of what feedback you want.

    - I suggest trying the page without the bright green bar around the photo.

    - There is a lot of text on the page – it takes quite an investment before I have an overview of the page.

    - Why not try an adwords campaign with multiple copies of the home page and just changing individual parts?

    - It’s not immediately clear that the text at the top left is also a menu.

    - You could reduce some of the clutter by moving the security statement and visa logos to a page where people actually start to shop

    From a personal viewpoint there is nothing I would say is bad. If you are experiencing high bounce rates then you may find the wrong keywords are getting triggered. You can set negative keywords in Adwords so that the ads will not appear for the wrong topics.

  6. Mr.Yap on February 6th, 2009 4:50 pm

    Here are my 2 cents input:

    >> What’s in It for Me
    Customers comes to your websites for a purpose. Your homepage has answer : “What’s in It for Me?”
    Upfront you list out what your site offers and you categories those into different pathway : children and Adult. Your prospect knows what you are offering.
    Unfortunately, I miss those links under both categories. I do not know those were click-able.

    You also have the Special Offer label there that is very hard to miss. However, the Special Offer label is too near the search. I thought the search field it only for special offer items. According to Gestalt principle, elements are placed close together they tend to be perceived as a group.

    >> Trust
    There is trust communicate via the website. An important elements for online business. There is a physical address and contact number. Thought I have not try calling that number.

    In addition, third-party security seal from Thawte reinforces the trust message. You also has a dedicated page for Security
    Policy. All these put your prospect at ease of doing business with you.

    Such elements of trust message is available throughout the websites.

    >> Text
    I found the text is too small to read on the screen.

    >> Customer-Focused Word
    I would recommend using the word “YOU”. Research has show that you will pay attention if you see the word you. Using words such as “you” or “your” helps customers relate emotionally to a product or service.

    >> Social Validation
    What other people said about your products carries more weight than what you said. You put that to good use.
    “What Customers Say” is buried among the left navigation links. I recommend putting this link (http://www.puddleducks.ie/puddleducks-customer-comments.html) in the top Navigation bar along with Home, About Us, Delivery, Contact Us.

    In that way, people will not miss it and goes a long way to get them to open their wallet.

    >> Too Many Choices for Navigation
    There are 14 links to click on your left navigation menu. It overwhelmed your prospects. Research has suggests that while lots of options can lure your customer to look, a smaller set of options persuades them to pick.

    Last thing you do not want people to freeze up and don’t take any action at all.

    Hope these helps.

    Regards,
    Yap
    http://www.linkedin.com/in/ssyap

  7. Aedan on February 7th, 2009 2:34 pm

    Thanks again everyone for your brilliant feedback and thanks to Roseanne and the IIA for providing the opportunity:

    @Leon – I agree it’s too busy and that there are too many colours. Good points about alignment. You are right the section at the bottom is for search engines – not really for customers to read. I will see if I can remove it but some of the terms in there are found by Google. I suppose a better practice is to take these terms and spread them as text throughout the site. Thanks again

    @ Frankp – very helpful comments – thanks. I know we had the issue of it not being obvious straightaway that the site is a shopping site. We tried to address this with the new and featured products. But more work is needed in this regard. Agree too on the initial focus being top rather than left.

    @fred – thanks from one Friday feedback-ee to another. Very useful comments. Good idea about moving some of the grey links to a footer. Again agree that the category links are not obvious enough.

    @keith Thanks for your comments – agree too much text on the page. I must make it more minimalist. It’s also crucial that the left menu is seen as a menu as this is the path to the shopping pages. That needs changing.

    @Mr Yap – Very helpful feedback. Good points again about the left menu not being obvious and about the search button. Will move that. Thanks for the Trust comments – that’s important to us. Great suggestions about customer comments and using “You” on the home page.

    Overall very valuable feedback. I can feel a redesign coming on.

  8. Feedback Friday for http://www.puddleducks.ie/ — Mr. Yap’s Blog on February 8th, 2009 11:51 am

    [...] first posted the above on Irish Internet Association’s Feedback Friday [...]

  9. frankp on February 9th, 2009 5:52 pm

    Glad they were helpful. Best of luck with the ammendments.

    Remember also – it’s not what people say but what they do, so I hope you have a good statistics / analytics package running to allow you to adapt according to how your visitors behave.

    Cheers!
    Frank

  10. Tom O'Connor on February 9th, 2009 11:05 pm

    The brand is wonderfull :) really great concept

  11. Roseanne Smith on February 10th, 2009 3:04 pm

    Thanks again to everyone who took part in Feedback Friday. A couple of people have commented that we should include a receive email updates feature and we will by next week all going to plan. Hopefully that will make it a lot more interactive and apologies that this is not already in place.

    If you are a member of the IIA and you would like to volunteer to be fed to the feedbackers please email me at members at iia dot ie or DM me on Twitter/ LinkedIn, Skype me – whatever!
    Roseanne

  12. Roseanne on February 10th, 2009 5:05 pm

    And now at last you can sub to comments on the IIA blog which should make Feedback Friday even more interactive.

  13. Feedback Friday for http://www.puddleducks.ie/ « Mr Yap @ Dublin,Ireland on June 21st, 2010 11:22 pm

    [...] 8, 2009 I first posted this on Irish Internet Association’s Feedback Friday PuddleDucks is an online retailer of outdoor clothing clothes for children and [...]

Leave a Reply