When I was brainstorming with the marketing team earlier this week about what company would be my next pick for my UX Review, I had been leaning towards reviewing a store – more specifically along the lines of fashion/clothing (the fashionista in me was bubbling). Immediately the team grinned and suggested the San Diego youth-fashion hot spot, Charlotte Russe.

CharlotteRusse.com along with the brick and mortar stores deliver style in clothing and accessories, providing an exciting, fashionable assortment of merchandise that compliments virtually every facet of our customers’ lifestyle. The stores provide fashion and lifestyle needs of young, fashion-conscious women in their teens and early twenties, offering trend right apparel and accessories at value prices.

Let’s take a look at CharlotteRusse.com and how they’re doing in usability and sociability since their launch 6 years ago. Headquartered here in San Diego – Charlotte Russe has undergone rapid expansion in the past couple of years – let’s see how the website is handling the growth.

Overall the brand is very powerful amongst the company’s demographic – women ranging from teens to early twenties. Women shop at Charlotte Russe because of what the brand delivers – stylish clothing and accessories for the fashion-conscious women in their teens & earlier twenties (24 is still early twenties, right?). Trendy apparel at value prices is the brand identity that resonates in a Charlotte Russe’s consumer’s mind.

Messaging: Instantly when I visit the site I understand Charlotte Russe. Trend setting models and pictures are the main focus on the homepage with an announcement explaining a current promotion. “SHORTS: Buy 1 get 1 free!” Wow if that isn’t value I don’t know what is – especially in the fashion world. They give me a call to action with “Shop Now” – well if I must…

Some other great messaging tactics at the bottom of the homepage tell me to visit the Fashion Lounge to see what’s hot, editor picks and how I can become a hot chic. How can I resist at this point? So I visit the Fashion Lounge and am immediately engaged with the features. Submit a photo and bio to become Hot Chic & win a $100 gift card, read editor picks from magazine clippings and see illustrations for 3 different ways on how to wear Refugee Crops. All of the messaging in this section is straight-forward and keeps me engaged.

Engagement Value: Like I stated above the engagement value in the Fashion Lounge is great. Not only can I submit my photo, bio, read more about the featured styles in magazines but I can also be taken to those items on their eCommerce section. In my opinion, that’s an easy conversion. You show the product in a real-life scenario, click on it with interest and throw it in the shopping cart within a few minutes of it drawing your interest.

The only thing I noticed in the Fashion Lounge was when I wanted to navigate to other sections of the Lounge with the navigation provided at the bottom of the page the link to “What’s Hot” wasn’t working. I suggest fixing that error immediately.

Fun: The site is definitely fun and has a unique personality. Each type of clothing has a different header image showcasing the in-style clothing, accessories, shoes, etc. The colors are bright and fun for the online shopper as well.

Quality of Material: Even with how fun and youth driven the site is, it’s still very professional and maintains the highest level of quality & security for its shoppers.

Style: Style is an integral part of Charlotte Russe and the site falls nothing short of that intention either. Their use of imagery, colors and text keep the site stylish, sleek and still comfortable for the online shopper.

1 Brand Strategy Recommendation
• Fix the link to the “What’s Hot” topic in the footer navigation

Overall, the social aspects of CharlotteRusse.com are pretty good even though there aren’t any social bookmarking components available for the community to run with. Here is my review of the social side of Charlotte Russe…

Viral Components: There are no social bookmarking, tagging or viral components offered on the site, currently. The site offers many options for visitors to rate clothing, submit feedback, and take surveys but nowhere are there social media options available to truly spread CharlotteRusse.com.

I would suggest taking a social media lesson from WetSeal.com. This competitor has a “My Boutique” feature which allows you to add clothes into a closet, mix and match pieces, purchase the outfit, tag, and send to a friend for review. I would totally buy that outfit! Maybe I will…

On CharlotteRusse.com you can send an item to a friend, which is nice but you can only send to one friend at a time (which is tedious) and who honestly knows their friend’s email addresses off the top of their head? I can’t even remember my own parents’ home phone number…sorry Mom!

Community: No community based around the site. At my initial review of the site I thought the Fashion Lounge was pretty cool, but there’s no community based around it. So where’s the point of community engagement, sharing and meeting? There is none.

Other Social Features: I would suggest including other social features like videos, pictures and blogs to the site to enhance the experience. CharlotteRusse.com could look into leveraging a “How do you wear Charlotte Russe?” video submission campaign. I can see this type of interactive marketing campaign going really far with their demographic.

3 Social Media Recommendations:
• Include a blog (don’t forget to allow comments!) to highlight latest trends, fashion week, video submissions, etc.
• Launch a video submission campaign and offer grand prize for most voted video
• Add in viral components for videos and blogs like digg, stumbleupon, reddit, del.icio.us, and facebook

Web Standards: Well, CharlotteRusse.com is using a table-less layout, which is apparently setup through a of CMS system and they’re still using tables in a bunch of locations like side navigation. Unfortunately, no one bothered to check the code because there are TONS of errors in validation, but most are for ampersand HTML entity errors so I guess isn’t too bad. Another thing I noticed – Ummm, tags go inside the tag, not between the DOCTYPE and the tag (http://www.charlotterusse.com/category/index.jsp?categoryId=2758878&clickid=header_footwear_button). Messy code implementation, lots of random in-line JavaScript and CSS definitions.

A good thing I noticed is that CharlotteRusse.com has a good use of multiple servers to help alleviate server load. They’re using a media server for image serving, CSS files, and most JavaScript files.

Analytics: Yes. CharlotteRusse.com is tracking through Omniture. They’re also using Feed Burner for RSS subscription tracking.

XML/RSS Feeds: Good use of RSS on the site: new arrivals alerts, product alerts, etc. Feed are clearly linked, no subscription required, include photos and pricing, and allow for easy integration into the user’s preferred feed reader.

SEO: CharlotteRusse.com has meta data (title, keyword and description tags) on the homepage but to increase the effectiveness of the SEO efforts Adding more content on the hompage that incorporates keyword-rich copy as the current homepage is using text as an image which cannot be indexed by search engines.
I took a look at the internal (clothing specific) pages as well and they’re using title/meta data for internal pages as well.

Browser Compatibility: Firefox, IE, No Mobile

Site Search: Search is actually pretty accurate and brings up very relevant and organized results. Some other helpful site search features include descriptive search terms in colors, “express shop”, and breadcrumbs which helps with navigation.

3 Technology Recommendations:
• Correct errors listed on XHTML and CSS errors (W3schools & W3C are great resources for proper code standards)
• Include keyword-rich copy on the homepage to assist in SEO efforts
• Add widget/mobile capabilities so people can access event info, updates, games, etc.

Design: For the most part, the design is clean and easy to flow through. However, I suggest doing a redesign of the Fashion Lounge. The graphics aren’t bad but the fuchsia bar that goes through each section of the Fashion Lounge is really annoying – perhaps using the icon at the bottom for each section that gets bigger with a mouse over would be more pleasing to the eyes.

Navigation: The links are not obvious enough they need rollover states or some visual indication of what is a link throughout the site.

Sitemap: CharlotteRusse.com has a site map. Today site maps are a common approach to facilitating navigation.

Survey Says: One last thing to note is that the survey is really bolt-on and out of place. If you click on the survey for any of the categories, it takes you to a completely generic layout being hosted by “Survey Monkey”. The survey doesn’t even do anything. It just takes you back to the page. No email follow-up, no re-direction to a page in the site that better suits your needs, no message even thanking you for the survey information. VERY poor implementation.

2 Functionality Recommendations:

• Redesign the usability & design in the Fashion Lounge
• Create obvious rollover states or visual indication of what a link is throughout the site

Brand Strategy – 4 Stars
Social - 2 Stars
Technology- 3 Stars
Functionality – 3 Stars

Overall the site has a lot of great features that keeps the shopping experience fun and allows shoppers to feel like a participant within the site. I wouldn’t necessarily say CharlotteRusse.com has a community around it but there is a definite potential for them to leverage their current user base and rally a community behind them. I would suggest focusing on social media marketing and community development. Incorporating additional interactive & viral features to the site (blogs, video submissions, competitions, other user generated content) with help to continuously grow and spread the word of the community. There’s definite potential to build upon the already strong brand and continue to build a loyal community of evangelists through innovative campaigns and a fun, functional well-oiled site

San Diego is known for its weather, its beaches and its attractions. Talk to any out of towner and they’ll likely tell you they are heading to one of two spots during their stay here: the World Famous San Diego Zoo or SeaWorld. We decided to take a stroll inside seaworld.com this week to give you an insider’s look at why the aquatic park’s website may not be as friendly as it could be to its patrons.

SeaWorld is synonymous with Shamu the famous Orca who defies gravity by jumping into the air at high speeds and then splashes brave park visitors who sit close to the glass. It’s an iconic American brand most adults and kids are familiar with. But the fact is SeaWorld has grown into something much bigger than the killer whale show. SeaWorld now operates three parks, not just in San Diego but one in Orlando and another in San Antonio (how did they get a killer whale across land?). SeaWorld is actually owned by another iconic mammal – one you’d recognize by the famous Clydesdale’s that are featured in their commercials. Anheuser-Busch which also owns Busch Gardens, operates SeaWorld Adventure Parks as well as a host of other amusement/ride parks.

Design: SeaWorld went through a recent design update for the site. It’s reflective of the park itself although the bright blues and yellow seem to be geared more towards kids. Its Adobe Flash heavy and relies on past visitor’s photos of their trip to provide all of the images.

Style: Very media heavy style. Pictures drive the site’s look through flash animation and small thumbnails that act as navigation. This is not a good way of creating the experience for a main website. A microsite maybe but not a site where you are trying to get people information about your parks and sell tickets. The entrance to the site seems detached from the rest of the interior pages like it was piece-mealed over time.

The style of the footer needs to be updated. Its inconsistent and while you are browse through the site at times it does not appear to be a footer. This should be updated for consistency and use a different color to break it as part of the main page design.

Quality of Material: The quality suffers because much of it is so hard to find. If you you want to learn about SeaWorld and its animals you actually have to leave the site. Want to learn about Shamu? – the famous Orca, or group of Orcas, (they are all called Shamu in the show) you have to go to Shamu.com. If you want to learn about the history of the park, marine conservation or the other animals – you have to go to SeaWorld.org – why this was split up dos not make any sense. Its seems that the main site was simplified to really just be a picture slide show and a ecommerce section.

Community: SeaWorld.com has taken a user generated content (UGC) approach to the design of their main website. All of the images and photos on the site were submitted by park visitors, an interesting strategy because although it offers community participation, it does not encourage the connecting of individuals themselves. It’s like they created a SeaWorld Flickr group – but don’t allow any of the social networking features – an oversight on their part.

Viral Components: No viral, (pull marketing) elements found or were available.

Well they know how to program in Flash, have some CSS knowledge and can do table layouts – all of which they have used to piece together this site.

Site Search: None available – would be nice for users who want to quickly search for something specific – say “park map” But since most of the site’s copy is hidden in Flash you probably wouldn’t get good results anyway, sigh.

XML/RSS Feeds: Interestingly, I found a list of podcasts you can subscribe too. The page though is setup incorrectly so that there isn’t an icon in your browser bar telling you can subscribe. You have to click on the XML link to go to that page. What SeaWorld visitor knows what an XML page is? My guess is 0.001% – Put the better known RSS orange icon on the main page as that is much better known.

Analytics: Using the SiteCatalyst the top rated analytics solution from Omniture. Goals would have to be moved to their ecommerce site which resided on a different domain.

Web Standards: Not using XHTML and CSS, but would beneft from doing so for mobile browsing, accessibility and compliance.

SEO: SeaWorld is not paying any attention to search engine optimization (SEO). It almost looks liked they have deliberately kept their site un-optimized. All you are going to show up for in Google with this effort is “seaworld.”

Browser Compatibility: Looks to be OK. I had some issues with browser compatibility when I started the review but it got better later on. I can’t recreate the pages that were unable to load on my home computer leaving empty flash movies.

Functionality is where there were the biggest challenges, but also the biggest opportunities for improvement.

Navigation: A main navigation that exists entirely in Flash thumbnails that cycle themselves and change based on UGC!! If I want to visit pages about different attractions it would be great if I didn’t have to guess which tiny little picture someone submitted means the Pacific Point Reserve. And even if I find it, the image may change later so there’s no repeat association. The navigation changes depending on the page you are on. This is another UX 101 no-no. There should be a main navigation up top that includes:

Home | Locations| Tickets and Vacations | Events | Information | Park Map

Sitemap: Missing the sitemap, another oversight that could easily be remedied.

Features: The additional features are all good ideas although some of the execution was not done very well

• They’ve got music playing – which was annoying and I turned off immediately. A few times it turned back on when I went to a new screen. This I did not like.
• The photo scroller operated too slowly
• The needs to be updated for design – looks like an Excel spreadsheet. It’s click-able although you wouldn’t know it.
• The interactive map was something that was pretty neat! – I’d highlight this feature and bring it up into the main navigation.
• MySeaWorld feature is a a great idea but poorly implemented. I setup the parameters for the visit, but I get taken back to a page that looks exactly like the experiences section. There is no indication that anything has changed, been updated, highlighted, or customized for me at all. I guess that it’s the photos/experiences that have been customized to “My SeaWorld”? This opens in a new window too to configure things and then takes you back to the experiences section – so now I have two windows open showing almost identical things, why?

Ecommerce: I assume the main goal of the site is to drive ticket sales to their parks. This being said the way they go about having you browse their options and buy tickets could be done better. On the tickets and vacations page – or Ajax overall (in some cases) some of the pictures are click-able and some not, again confusing. The corporate packages is a great idea but you have to have a minimum number – which they don’t have next to the quantity so if you put in 12 they’ll tell you on the next screen to go back.

Overall Score – 1 Star out of 5

• Brand Strategy – 3 stars
• Social – 1 Star
• Technology – 1 Star
• Functionality – 1 Star

There’s definitely a lot of room for improvement when the A-B team is thinking about updating the site again. Consistent navigation and footers would be a start, sitemaps, and more straight forward functionality that makes sense to the LCD (lowest common denominator) website visitor. Big friendly photos showing off the animals and families having fun is great – we love the connection to the overall experience, The important thing is to tie that back in with having great, easy, useful experience on the website. After all the fun is going to happen in the park, not on your website. Keep somebody guessing and they’ll likely get annoyed – but – make it simple for them and they will reward you with ticket purchases, repeat visitations and referrals to your friends and family.

Active.com is a San Diego based online community for people who are passionate about team sports, health & fitness, and other recreational activities. Active.com serves as a portal to connect athletes to like-minded athletes, sports, training programs, tips and nutrition.

Since its first site launch in 1999, Active.com hasn’t been through as many redesigns as I would have expected – the first design for Active.com was launched in 2000 and was kept until 2001 and then Active posted a change in 2002 through 2007. For five years Active.com kept the same static, 3-bubbled homepage design. In summer of 2007 they launched a newly designed look (beta) so let’s see how the redesign pans out…

Overall the brand is very powerful. Active.com is headquartered here in San Diego and has been a major sponsor and participant with local and national sporting events. People all over the U.S. easily recognize and associate the Active brand with sport activities – especially marathons.

Messaging: When I come to the homepage I know that Active.com is for the passionate runner, team sports enthusiast, and fitness coach. The site is very much geared towards community building techniques like videos, coaching, lessons, and team sporting events. But what exactly does Active.com do? That question is not immediately answered after visiting the homepage.The only thing I would suggest is to include a tagline in the header that directly states what the brand is all about. What is Active.com here to help people with? What’s in it for the user to participate in this community?

“Active.com is the leading online community for people who want to discover, learn about, share, register for and ultimately participate in activities about which they are passionate.”

To find out what Active is all about you have to go all the way to the bottom of the page and click on About Active.com to see what they do. I would like to see that one-liner in the header as a shortened tag line. Bring more punch to the messaging!

Engagement Value: When I first jumped onto the site I wasn’t too sure where to begin. There’s a rotating box at the top with featured marathon outcomes, weigh loss tips, and soccer practice group info. But what do I click on first…? The engagement on the homepage is so weak that I’m lost and unmotivated to do anything there. There are tons of easy (and fun) ways to make this page more engaging – spice up the homepage with colors, include BIG buttons for conversion points such as newsletter and RSS sign ups, include the ability to actually play a video on the homepage (not shoot me off to another page), or include newly posted blogs on the upper fold.

The Active Endurance entity has the idea of organization and engagement down. They use brightly colored buttons as a way to flow the visitor through the site in an organized fashion. There are also prominent ways for a user to convert via the Contact Us, Request a Quote, and Request More Info. These are types of simple, yet important features I would suggest Active.com implement.

Fun: Right away the site doesn’t look fun. Honestly. The static nature of the site dulls down what the intensity and fun could potentially be. Including bigger pictures, colored buttons and text, a countdown for the next marathon or winner of the last tri are all ways to create a fun atmosphere. Think of the energy and intensity of the 35,000 runners the morning of the San Diego Rock ‘n Roll Marathon – that’s the level of fun Active needs throughout the entirety of the site.Right now the community feature is beneath the fold so it is easy to miss to the first time visitor. I suggest throwing that up above the fold so it’s easier to find and will add some “fun” to the site.

Click on image to enlarge

Quality of Material: That’s the great thing about Active.com, the material is very informative and maintains a high level of quality. So props to Active!

Style: The style is ok. Actually, I don’t feel like there is even that much style. It’s just a white background with no obvious navigation, no focus areas, and no personality. I would say the current site isn’t styled – it’s just a sheet of white resting on a bed of code…waiting for a designer to spruce it up.

2 Brand Strategy Recommendations

• Include a one-liner message in the header as a shortened tag line
• Spice up the homepage with personality by adding some color, include buttons for easy user flow & conversion points such as newsletter and RSS sign ups, split up the sections with background colors

Overall, the social aspects of Active.com are pretty good even though there aren’t many social bookmarking or viral components available for the community to run with. Here is my review of the social side of Active…

Viral Components: The social bookmarking components available Ie: digg, stumble, send to friend, etc. are not very prominent on the article pages. Even to a power user, like myself, it was hard to figure out what all of these buttons mean. I would suggest making them a bit more obvious to the user:

What do each of these mean? Also use different colors to make them stand out. There’s a rating system for users to rate the blogs but I’m not sure how many people would even notice it since it’s at the bottom corner of the post. There is a commenting system on the blogs – but there is no conversation on these posts. I don’t even see where the option is to leave a comment on these posts. I looked at each post and there is no “leave a comment” button. This could be a reason why there is no activity on these posts. Do I have to create an account to comment on a blog? If that’s the case, users shouldn’t have to jump that hurdle just to post comments on a blog. Open up the community so you can begin to generate some conversation on these posts.

I will say Active has included some key aspects on the blogs like tagging, RSS, and commenting as well as a community push and other sharing features – but the current elements just aren’t cutting it.

Community: At first glance it looks like there is a large community centered on the Active.com network. I browsed the community of people in My Active and saw there were over 32,000 pages of user profiles on the site – holy crap! That’s a good amount of users. But then I did a little digging and noticed that most of these users aren’t doing anything on the site. Even the profile (bigapplepie) who has the top rated ‘Status Level’ profile in the community hasn’t updated his profile in over 4 months and hasn’t contributed any personal blogs, videos or saved any stuff to share with the community. Fraudulent! There is potential for genuine and massive community involvement but right now it’s just an online ghost town.

Other Social Features: Something that I noticed was the ‘Top Members’ list on the Blogs and Threads page. I am a true advocate for giving users the power to gloat as a top member when they are an extremely active participant in the community. If a member is going to blog, comment, share stories, and post info to the community then I’m all about giving them top member status in a list format. Why not? So great job on that Active!

Another social feature I noticed was the ‘Pulse Check’ poll on the homepage. I think it’s a great idea to get your community’s opinion but I tested it out and noticed that there’s no limit as to how many times I can vote. Talk about skewed results! What I would suggest is placing a cookie onto each user’s browser so they may only vote once per poll. Also, I would suggest replacing the poll at least once a month to keep it somewhat engaging.

3 Social Media Recommendations:

• Add in viral components for videos and blogs like digg, stumbleupon, reddit, del.icio.us, and facebook
• Include text or button under each post “leave a comment” – make it obvious
• Fix the poll to allow users only to vote once

Web Standards:It looks like they tried to use some modern coding techniques, but didn’t follow through all the way. There are a ton of in-line CSS style definitions that really should be in an external file. They have made good use of lists for navigation and a fairly consistent code structure. Advertiser technology causes some pop-up blockers to initiate – baaaad.

Friendly URLs people, this is 2008, not 1995 – no page URL should ever look like this:

http://search.active.com/?categoryid=Activities&i=1&mediatype=Tournament&saved_q=&sort1=none&u1=categoryid&u2=mediatype

It should look like this (everything else should be in a session cookie):

http://search.active.com/Activities/Tournament

XML/RSS Feeds: None on the homepage Sad. There are RSS feeds for the community and forum updates but nothing is prominent on the homepage to let people know they have the option to subscribe to updates on the site. Make the RSS feeds prominent so that people know they are available to them.

Analytics: Yes. Active is using HBX from Visual Sciences. This is a great way to keep track of who your visitors are, where they’re coming from, what pages they access the most, how long they’re staying on the site, where the drop off pages are and what conversion points are failing or thriving.

SEO: Active.com has title tags but no description or keyword tags on the homepage. I took a look at a few internal pages as well and it seems like they’re using title/meta data for internal pages.

Browser Compatibility: Firefox, IE, No Mobile

Site Search: Active offers on-site search which is pretty comprehensive. I searched, for example, “San Diego marathon” and was able to sort the results by relevancy, name and date. Search is relational, this is good. It isn’t just a direct query for titles. No results found page offers possible other suggestions, but the results are a little strange.I searched for “spellunking” and it didn’t even come up with “spelunking” as a possible alternative term. Instead I got “spellbinding, speaking, spending” – wtf? If you’re going to have this feature in here (which I recommend you do) make the thing work right or don’t do it at all.

4 Technology Recommendations:

• Correct errors listed on XHTML and CSS errors (W3schools & W3C are great resources for proper code standards)
• Include meta data for the homepage and any interior pages that are missing them
• Implement RSS feeds on the homepage that users can subscribe to for website/community/forum updates
• Add mobile capabilities so people can access event info, updates, games, etc. via mobile

Design: The main issue I see with the visual design is lack of contrast with graphics on the page, but at the same time, too much contrast in text areas. For the contrast on the pages, it would be helpful to differentiate sections with subtle background colors. This will help the page to not feel like one huge flat wall of text. And for the text itself, small color shifts could go a long way.The site is large and rich with information. All this text on each page can make it hard on the eyes. While reading articles I find myself squinting to help my eyes focus on one line of text. I suggest changing the text color to a deep gray rather than full on black and increasing the line height on full article pages.

Navigation: Interaction within the Community module on the home page is confusing. The four links on the left Discussions, Blogs, Tags and People should all trigger the same behavior because they look the same and are stacked to the left of preview content. The gray area forms a tab around the left-side link and relates the content to the right of it to that section. When I click the next link Blogs, it’s now got the gray background and I can clearly see that the content on the right is now related to Blogs. This is a nice way for users to preview content without leaving this page. When I click the next link Tags, I expect the same interaction, but to my surprise I’m taken to a whole new section of the website.Sometimes the logo is linked to the Active.com homepage and sometimes it isn’t. I was exploring in the ad center and wanted to go back to the homepage. Wait – how do I get back to the homepage? The logo isn’t linked…one of my biggest website pet peeves!
Sitemap: Active has a site map which is great for both visitors and search engines. It isn’t clear if they have an XML site map which is usually submitted to Google Webmasters and can also offer additional valuable information.

Features: There are a lot of different features on the homepage – I am a little bit confused when I get to the site because nothing stands out to me and says “Click me, Click me! Go here.” Like stated above, some small color shifts between text and different sections would make features stand out more.

User Interaction: Super freaking busy site. TONS of navigation presented to the user all at once. It’s a little overwhelming. Here are a few things I noticed:

• I don’t like this automatic swapping back and forth between tabs on the home page (weekend planner, healthy lifestyles, and activities & events tabs). Its distracting and annoying when you’re about to click on something and it swaps to the other tab on you. Not to mention that it isn’t a consistent height across all tabs and shifts the entire center column.
• Articles have lots of share options, they’re using Add This for their social network sharing – good mashup.
• The image ads are targeted pretty well, however the sponsored advertisement text links make no sense at all – Villanova Project Management? What does this have to do with sports? Credit Score, credit cards, and online MBAs? That’s a real stretch.
• The navigation is very inconsistent across all the sections and makes tunneling around the site confusing at times.

5 Functionality Recommendations:

• Prominently show the user what to do on the homepage (newsletter, rss feed sign up, commenting)
• Create highly visible buttons and points on the site that assists in user flow
• Change the text color to a deep gray rather than full on black and increase the line height on full article pages
• For the contrast on the pages differentiate sections with subtle background colors
• Make sure to maintain high relevancy for all ads on the site
• Make sure the logo is always linked to the Active.com homepage

Brand Strategy – 3 Stars
Social – 3 Stars
Technology- 3 Stars
Functionality – 3 Stars

Overall the site has a lot of potential. For the amount of content and variety of athletes the site caters to I am actually pretty impressed with the overall organization and cleanliness of the site. However I would still tackle some of the recommendations given above in each of the categories since there are areas that need tinkering.

I would focus a lot on the community and viral aspects of the site because the network is so massive there is a definite potential for this community to grow exponentially. Remember to include viral components on the site so that the community can spread blogs, videos and polls as they please.

I would also focus on creating the personality of the site to match that of Active’s user base. Focus on the fun and excitement that sports and fitness training brings to people’s lives! Integrating some mild color changes in the text, color contrasts between sections and larger images will bring Active.com to the level their passionate athletes truly deserve!

We received great feedback from our first UX review spotlighting SignOnSanDiego and are really looking to keep the momentum rolling. At dt we are focused on bringing the community together and highlighting the companies and the people that make them up. So for this edition we’re staying local and taking you on a ride through PETCO.com… PETCO is one of the most recognizable brands in San Diego, and really across the country. As they say on their website “With over 850 stores in 49 states and the District of Columbia, chances are there’s a PETCO store in your neighborhood.” Besides having a large presence in San Diego county, including 22 retail stores, they have their name on one of MLBs most beautiful ballparks.

Design: PETCO very recently did a design facelift so the site has a fresh look and feel. There were a few confusing elements we ran across related to the homepage design and the promotional boxes that we wanted to highlight.

1. The border design on the large promo box makes it look out of place, like it doesn’t belong with the site. It could also serve it’s purpose if it were smaller, a bit too big for the page. The calls to action aren’t clear on these promos. Users may stare at them, but what are they supposed to DO? Nothing looks like a button to click. The blue text on the bottom right should be click-able and it would help if it had an arrow or was a button, so it looked click-able.
   
2. The links under the promo box all look like gift cards. Their style and shape make them all look like gift cards even though only one of the link takes you to the gift cards.

Style: While the style is not going to win any awards it isn’t terribly bad either. The style is a little bland but consistent with most ecommerce sites – the point is to get you quickly to the product or page you are looking for in the least number of steps. Some of the styles are a little conflicting as in the case of the DIV containers which go from (rounded corners) to [square corners] to (rounded corners) to [square corners].

Quality of Material: The site has been well planned out and has a wealth of information. PETCO has a lot of products and they have done a good job organizing most of that information for their users to find. It takes a few steps to find it but sections like The Answers Den has specific questions and answers from the community which really add value to overall experience. There are numerous product reviews and general comments on the site that help you make informed purchasing decisions.

3 design recommendations

• Update the border design of the promo box to be consitent with the style of the site
• Add in calls to action and click-able looking links to encourage flow
• Promote The Answers Den more to curious shoppers through the large promo box

While the website is far from a social network, there is a very social (and viral) aspect to the site because of the customer interaction through product reviews and question and answer sections – much like an Amazon. The loyal customer base has created a wealth of content for visitors to read before they buy pet-related products.

Community: PETCO ’s The Answer Den offers a community aspect similar to what you see with Yahoo Answers – post a question about your dog, cat or ferret and chances are somebody in the community has an answer. Note: I noticed that there are prizes given away for people that contribute the most content in form of answers. Since they are doing this transparently it does not feel as forced as if they were secretively paying people to generate content for the site.

Viral Components: PETCO does a great job implementing many of todays most popular viral and social networking components. See a great cat tree that you think your friend might like who is also on Facebook? You can post it to them through the system. There are links for del.icio.us and digg.com as well as a forward to a friend link to facilitate both push and pull marketing.

Blog: PETCO has a company blog although its not easily found. Can you find it? The name isn’t exactly descriptive but if you do a little searching you’ll find a link called “PETCONews.com” -That’s it! This takes you to their separate domain where they update you on what’s going on in the community. Its not a very good blog though, no comments, no RSS and seems like a half-baked idea – especially the minimal design and lack of functionality.

Email Sign Up: Wording here should be changed to emphasize the benefit instead of the feature. No one really wants more email. I’m turned off by “Sign up for emails” but rather I might be interested in “Exclusive Online Discounts, Pet Tips & More!”

4 Social Media Recommendations:

• Update the blog with RSS
• Add the ability to click and read individual posts and subscribe via email
• Change/test the wording “sign up for emails” CTA – explain the benefits of getting another email in your inbox
• Post the blog feed to areas of the site including the homepage

XML/RSS Feeds: Good implementation for RSS feeds. Most of the target audience visiting this website is not going to be familiar with RSS. The addition of an interim page to explain what RSS is, how to use it, how to sign up for it, and what applications to read it in is a good ramp for un-informed users to get into using the technology.

Code: Strange that PETCO is still using the HTML 4.01 Transitional DOCTYPE, but at least they aren’t using a <table> layout! While this is odd, it may actually increase accessibility for more browser types, especially mobile browsers, which (with the exception of the iPhone) usually don’t read the newer XHTML DOCTYPE specification. Coding methods and standards are very antiquated and mixed. Tons of deprecated implementations, but modern DIV based layout – either the time was not taken or even worse, the victim of computer generated development.

URL Structure: Ugly urls – these are not human friendly at all. From the look of things everything is being tracked in the URLs for analytics purposes – here’s an example of one for the homepage: http://www.petco.com/petco_Page_PC_home_nav_1.aspx? cm_sp=hdr-_-logo-_-050208

Web Standards: The site is not valid HTML or CSS. More of the benefits of Web Standards can be read here.

Load Time: Site speed on database heavy pages could be a little quicker. Pages are very heavy code wise.

Analytics: Using Google Analytics to track visitor behavior on the site which is great. I know they also do a bit of landing page testing to improve conversion rates.

SEO: PETCO has done a pretty good job with search engine optimization. They rank in very high for the keywords in their title tag but could improve with making more of their website and blog search-able.

Browser Compatibility: Good cross browser compatibility for Firefox and IE7.

4 Technology Recommendations:

• Updating the site using current WC3 web standards depending on objectives
• Make the Answers Den indexable by the search engines
• Use search engine, and user friendly URLs
• Lighten up the page code and speed up database times

The site navigation and functionality performed well overall. We liked the search result screen when searching by a particular pet type. Most likely you are visiting the site because you already have a specific pet. You should be able to search a pet type and find everything you need for that pet. PETCO.com supports this mentality with the way they organize the search result screen. What would be great which you see has worked so well with other ecommerce giants like Amazon is the similar products suggestion. If I am looking at particular dog bed it would be nice to have a link that says: Want to see more products like this?

Site Search: Like most ecommerce sites they’ve got it and it works ok, but not amazingly – My search for “cat tree” (yes those hideous and expensive pieces of feline furniture) didn’t turn up a lot of results for the products I know they stock. Either fix the database querying to be able to get more concise results or use third party software – like that offered from Google to power your search features- See Google Appliance

Navigation: Good main navigation organization and logical categorization – easy to find what you’re looking for but a few things stuck out. – The top navigation doesn’t really look like a button until you hover over them. The red text links are misleading. Sometimes red text is a link but sometimes it’s not. Switching to a consistent blue text link would be helpful. The breadcrumbs that are on the page are helpful, but only if they work. I found myself on a page for cat trees but the breadcrumbs were all messed up.

Sitemap: An HTML sitemap exists in the footer but I couldn’t find a Google Webmasters XML file which helps in identifying dead links and 404s as well as telling the search engines when you update specific pages.

Security: Certifications from Hackersafe and Goodmail

Features: PETCO’s Bottomless bowls is a really neat feature for those of you who are very busy and sometimes return home to your anxiously awaiting pet forgetting to pick up the cat litter, dog food or chew toys!

6 Funtionality Recommendations:

• Improve search functionality
• Give the top main navigation a tab style for clarity
• Update link colors for consistency
• Need to have a link on an individual product page. Want to see more products like this?
• If missing, add a Google Webmasters XML sitemap
• Fix breadcrumb issues when browsing

Overall Score – 3 Stars out of 5

Brand Strategy – 3 Stars

Social – 3 Stars

Technology- 3 Stars

Functionality – 4 Stars

Overall PETCO.com has done a great job implementing the latest web technology into their site and have also kept it clear and relatively easy to navigate for such a large ecommerce site. Acting on many of these recommendations will do small but effective things to improve user experience as well as generate additional traffic through Search’s Long Tail. We welcome comments and additional questions into our review of the site and any information listed here.

Welcome to digital-telepathy’s newest section of our blog where we take well known brands and startups and put them through a User Experience (UX) review. We do these reviews as a way to promote untapped opportunities that these company’s have that seem to be just beyond their view of sight. We look at 4 main areas for our audit including their online brand strategy, social aspects, implementation of technology and functionality. All in all we hope the companies read our reviews, ask questions, comment and make changes to create a more enriching experience for their web community.

SignOnSanDiego.com is the digital sister of the San Diego Union Tribune. Since its launch almost 11 years ago, SignOnSanDiego.com has been through many redesigns – in fact almost every single year the design was changed completely. But is the functionality and UX farther along today than from their first version launched 11 years ago? Something tells me I’m headed for an interesting review…

Overall the brand is powerful. The Union Tribune has a very strong resonance with the community of San Diego which infiltrates over to SignOnSanDiego’s (SOSD) brand and credibility. SOSD has a lot of brand recognition as a reputable news source because of the UT.

Messaging: The SignOnSanDiego brand is not as prominent as it could be – especially on the homepage. The brand should be recognized as the most important part of the site – since it is powered by the UT. Elevate the brand to the level it truly is.

Engagement Value: The Street Blog has a decent brand identity – the posts are light and easy to read. Some other things I noticed were the missing archive area (how do I access a post from last year?), no working RSS feeds for the blogs and a massive form I have to fill out before I can sign up for a site RSS feed.

Fun: All of the interactive and community based features on the site are half way down the page and beneath the fold – it’s hard to find these features they’re the ones I want to see right away. If I don’t see these right away I am not going to spend a lot of time looking for them – ‘buh bye’.

Quality of Material: The material is informative and high quality. In my opinion the organization of the homepage makes the quality seem much lower than it really is.

Style: The style blows. The site is pushed over to the left side of the browser – not centered or clean. Tons of ads plastered on the homepage which dilutes the brand. Change the Entertainment Guide to look like SOSD content not an ad!

7 Site Fixes to Do Now:

1. Enlarge the logo and push to left margin.
2. Do not allow ads and other brands in header space that “sandwich” the logo. That space should be reserved for your brand only.
3. Include archive section on the weblog
4. Create a one click process to sign up for the RSS reader. Get rid of the damn form!
5. Rename the “forum” tab in the navigation to “blogs”
6. Center the page with the browser
7. Make sure content boxes do not resemble ads

Overall, the social aspects of SignOnSanDiego need a face lift. There are hardly any viral components and little to no community management. Here is my review of the social side of SignOnSanDiego…

Viral Components: None of the multimedia blogs and videos (besides The Street Blog) has viral features/components available. Ie: digg, stumble, send to friend, etc. There’s no rating system for users to rate videos or blogs. There is a commenting system on blogs – but there is no conversation on these posts. How can we attract readers to comment and generate some rich content on these blogs? I looked at each post and there is no “leave a comment” button. This could be a reason why there is little to no activity on these posts.

Community: The Spanish site www.mienlace.com looks nice! The continuity and organization of content is much more inviting than SOSD. The fact that SOSD has included the Hispanic population in their efforts is significant and I’m very happy to see the commitment to this community. The newsletter offers the option to personalize which is a plus for the choosy reader. SignonRadio offers the ability for live streaming. There’s also weekly sports, politics chats which is an interactive way to keep the community engaged and coming back.

Other Social Features: Wiki access – San Diego bands is a really great way for local musicians to keep in touch, promote their tours and answer community questions. The only problem is that NOBODY is using it. There are NO tags listed, no entries, no comments, etc. This area could be a really great resource for locals & bands if it was actually leveraged. Why is nobody editing this?

Side Note: A funny (yet frustrating) note was after I wrote this section’s review I realized a day later that I wanted to include a screenshot of the page. Little did I know this would be no simple task. To my surprise I couldn’t find the damn wiki for the life of me. Where is this wiki? Why is it so hard to locate? How did this happen? So many unanswered questions… maybe this is why nobody is contributing content to the wiki section. Needless to say, you all don’t get a screenshot in this section.

4 Site Fixes to Do Now:

1. Add in viral components for videos and blogs (Street blog does include social bookmarks) like digg, stumbleupon, reddit, del.icio.us, and facebook
2. Include text or button under each post to “leave a comment” – make it obvious for the reader
3. If you truly want to stay on MySpace – nurture and grow the community a bit more. Answer comments & messages immediately. Provide some REAL value and uniqueness on this page with an events calendar, VIP announcements, underground band tours, etc.
4. Make the wiki an obvious feature on the site. This could take off and become a very important lead generation, seo tactic & community element – but it’ll never get there if nobody can find it.

Web Standards: No. If you validate your code it will make it easier for:

• Search engines to index your web pages
• Pages to load faster
• Make your pages accessible for other devices that surf
  the Web
• Checking coding errors by running your pages through a
  validator

XML/RSS Feeds: No.As stated above you have to fill out a massive form before subscribing to the RSS feed.I’ve never heard of such a thing and the reader needs to be fixed. And once it is I can bet the RSS subscription conversions will increase substantially.

Analytics: Yes. SignOnSanDiego is using Google Analytics. This is a great way to keep track of who your visitors are, where they’re coming from, what pages they access the most, how long they’re staying on the site, where the drop off pages are and what conversion points are failing or thriving.

SEO: SignOnSanDiego has title/meta data but there are way too many keywords. WTF? Keyword tags should contain less than 250 characters. UT is using: 2,300!!! The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. However most crawlers now ignore the tag. This means there is no reason to have that many keywords. It’s wasted space in your code.

Browser Compatibility: Mobile, Firefox, IE

Site Search: SignOnSanDiego offers on-site search which can be categorized into businesses, web, entertainment, etc. – if you spell the keyword wrong UT offers suggestions for the correct spelling, which is nice.

3 Site Fixes to Do Now:

1. Correct errors listed on XHTML and CSS errors
2. W3schools & W3C are great resources for proper code standards
3. Compress the meta data to 6 -10 page specific keywords. Keep it short and get rid of misspelled words

Design: The design looks like a patch work of different styles and is a bit choppy because the background color blends in with the topics – very hard to differentiate the transitions between content, ads and blank space.

Navigation: There are 3 navigation points above the fold of the homepage…three!? So many navigation points make it extremely confusing for the visitor to figure out the flow & focus of the page (especially first time visitors). Also across various sections of the site there are several different navigation points. I have four shown below. This needs to be cleaned up from a usability standpoint.

Entertainment Navigation

Homepage Navigation

Jobs Navigation

Today’s Paper Navigation

Sitemap: SignonSanDiego has a site map. One of the oldest hypertext usability principles is to visualize the structure of the information space to help users understand where they can go. On today’s Web, site maps are a common approach to facilitating navigation.

Features: There are so many sections and features on the homepage – I am so confused when I get to the site…what am I supposed to do first? Nothing is obvious to me.

6 Site Fixes to Do Now:

1. Prominently show the user what to do on the homepage (newsletter, rss feed sign up, commenting). These features would also offer a great conversion point which gets a user to an ultimate end goal on the site.
2. Create highly visible buttons and points on the site that users automatically know to click
3. Darken the background color with lighter boxes to break up the spaces for each topic. This will help create a more stylized and organized feel to the page.
4. Update the weblog page to the newest design! The logo/style/template of the site changes from homepage to weblog.signonsandiego.com. The weblog page still uses the old template from 2005! Eek!
5. Differentiate between content and ads
6. Provide consistent navigation throughout the site. Condense the extra navigation points into one focused navigation. What’s the differentiation for the various colors of the navigation?

Overall Score – 2 Stars out of 5

Brand Strategy – 3 Stars
Social – 2 Stars
Technology- 1 Star
Functionality – 1 Stars

Overall the site needs a face-life. It’s great that the site offers content for all varieties of readers – entertainment, blogs, news, sports, etc. However there’s a lot happening on that first page – which is a bit overwhelming! I would recommend cleaning up the space by creating sections for related content. Take a look at CNN.com – even just a simple blocked off section/box on the site for related content keeps it clean and organized. They even have room for ads that aren’t obtrusive or annoying. I can scroll through the homepage and can find, for example, the blog section very easily. Even though it’s below the fold – that’s ok – it’s about keeping these features prominent and cleaned up so anybody can find them.

Another huge issue is the number of varying navigation points the site has. It looks like as SignOnSanDiego.com grew they hired different designers to work on the different sections. This creates a varying design across the site. There is no continuity between pages – a well designed template that can be used site-wide would create a much richer user experience and make many designers happier.