Just Kids Website - as at 12 July 2008

Posted July 12th, 2008 in Case Studies (Updated August 7th, 2008)

After 3 months of on and off work on the new Just Kids website we'll finally be ready to launch it next week. I decided this would be a good opportunity to have a look at the existing website and some of the usability issues with it which we have overcome with the new version of the website.

Just Kids (or JK) is a New Zealand based retail chain of kids clothing stores for children with stores in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, and an online presence with both New Zealand and Australian ecommerce stores.

Update August 7th 2008: The new version of the JK Kids Gear website was launched on August 5th. I have posted about this here.

One of the issues with the current website is there are simply too many clicks to get from the homepage through to a list of products and ultimately into your shopping bag. The first screenshot below shows the homepage with the homepage and department landing page top navigation which does not have a search function present anywhere on the page. On the existing website it takes two clicks to get to the search function (although if you click one of the banners at the bottom of the page, or About Us etc you can get here in one but the natural thing to do is to click one of the big nav buttons).

After clicking the babies navigation button from the homepage you get to a landing page where you can select from newborn, baby girl or baby boy. The other department landing pages are the same but divided into ages 1 to 6 and 7 to 12 for the boys and girls, or a split screen leading to the same page for maternity. As you can see below the top navigation is still the same as the homepage.

Now we're in the newborn section and the top navigation changes and now actually shows the logo. There's also side navigation which finally has a seach function at the bottom. From here you can either click a category in the left navigation or select one of the key looks. We're two clicks into the site and still haven't seen any products.

After clicking one of the side navigation items we are finally on a product page as shown in the screenshot below.

A fourth click on one of the products brings us to a product page where we can finally add the item to our shopping bag. We then need to select a colour and size from the colours and options drop down boxes before clicking the "Add to shopping bag" link. The available sizes change depending on availabilty of the colour selection but the way it currently works is not easily apparant what is and isn't available and there have been frustrated customers emailing/calling about this.

After adding the item to the bag the page loads again and the item is added to the cart. A Javascript alert appears to tell you it's been added to the bag. To now view other products in the category / search results etc you would then need to hit the browser's back button a couple of times or select the category again in the left nav.

There are some other issues with the current site that needed to be addressed. The search function doesn't bring up all the products that it should, e.g. searching on pants only brings up a few items when there are a large number of pants in the website. Searching on a product "style", which is the product's primary key in the database, for some reason takes about 12 seconds to render the search results page.

Early next week we will be relaunching the JK website with the new design and functionality. The end result should be a far improved customer experience with less clicks and page loading. We will then continue to enhance and expand the website's functionality. More details next week after the new site goes live...