As others have, I'll drop in some thoughts. Sorry if they're repeats! No particular order.
First, the focus on mother/father's day doesn't really seem sensible. I'll assume it's what your initial products focus on, but I definitely wouldn't keep it. My guess is it's designed primarily to separate male and female - doing so with gender options, and then drilling down into personality options would seem to make a lot more sense.
I can understand that your app doesn't support the back button - but your UI needs to solve that problem for the user. Done shopping for mum and want to shop for dad? (Doesn't apply to mother's/father's day, but birthdays?) Refresh the page and start again.
An obvious issue is that father's day isn't supported. Fair enough that there's no personality filters, but looking briefly through all the items available, there are some clearly for men (Personalized Man Cave Doormats was on the first page). Why not show them?
Okay, so selecting mother's day instead, I can see why that's supported first since it's mother's day in America soon? Anyway, the options probably shouldn't be radio - mum could easily be awesome and a wine lover. The family gardener could easily imply outdoorsy. The hostess could easily imply wine lover. No need to model such connections, but let users select more than one.
The more serious issue is that the buttons don't work. Ubuntu Firefox 20.0,
- Click mother's day, next question
- Click 'An awesome mom' (all other buttons work fine), get gift suggestions
Firebug info:
POST: http://www.giftwell.com/discover/
Result: Internal server error. On your website, there's no result and I'm left assuming that button is broken.
GET: http://api.mixpanel.com/track/?data=<snip>&ip=1&...
Result: 1 (appears to be the same as successful requests)
--
- Click any radio option button, get gift suggestions
No POST request made
http://api.mixpanel.com/track/?data=<snip>&ip=1&...
Result: 1 (same as above)
--
- Now, as a user I am left assuming that your form simply doesn't function. No button will work any more.
--------------------
Okay, so that's a bug, but it completely breaks the UX on what seems to be the primary user experience right now.
So going into mother's day, selecting a working button (wine lover), I get only 5 results. There's tonnes of space below, but no more results shown. I click show more results, and I get 5 more. How come these weren't shown before? If there's somewhere infinite scrolling should be used, it's here. Fix that view gifts button somewhere and just show me everything relevant.
Or, maybe don't. Right now the results simply aren't relevant. They change every time I visit the page from the same options, but one time I got a sun towel and then 4 wine products. The next time I got watches, succulents (never heard of these, from the picture china plantpots?) and 2 wine products. The filters definitely need work.
When I saw them succulents, I thought I'd click to see what they were. Fortunately, that opened a modal with a picture and some information. Unfortunately, when it was fully loaded it scrolled so I could only see the top (as much as fitted on my screen). I couldn't move the scrollbar in Firefox for some reason, and the modal didn't have a scrollbar. In short, I could see a bigger version of the picture, and knew some text was there because I saw it loading, but it's unusable.
When I closed the modal, I tried again. No luck, it just didn't open this time. There's a problem with your Javascript - I can only open one modal per visit.
In the no thanks, show me everything menu, I get, well, everything. There's no filters and no sorting. It's also a different experience, there's no consistency. This time there's no weird thing in the top right corner of every image (what is that by the way, it didn't do anything?), and there's a buy/save button when I hover over an image. I prefer this layout, not sure why it's different though. Also, the modal scrolled this time (it was a lot shorter, that could be the problem), but I could still only open one per visit.
-
Sorry to be so harsh, but as a user my experience on your website was broken, fragmented and confusing. I hope my feedback is useful, if you need any more information about anything I said (user feedback always misses important information, I doubt mine's an exception), let me know.
My best suggestion would be to simplify the concept, a lot. I would suggest infinite scrolling, show me the best stuff you've got as soon as I arrive and for as long as I want to keep looking. Or at least proper pagination, where I can go forward as well as backward.
Then, add proper filters. Gender and age are an obvious start (you capture them to some extent in mother/father of course), and then drill down to personality. I'd use the same personality types in the same order for each, but adjust their names for gender/age (eg action man for young boys etc etc..). Or just use the same simple names. Make them checkboxes too, and have the items shown change as I change them.
That would solve a lot of the problems - inconsistency between filters, broken filters, not showing enough products, no proper pagination of results. I expect it'd be a lot more engaging too. I also imagine it would remove a lot of the requests to your server.
-
Overall, I like the concept, but I think the UX could be drastically improved by a focus on showing more (this could encourage better curation too?) and more general purpose, useful filters.
First, the focus on mother/father's day doesn't really seem sensible. I'll assume it's what your initial products focus on, but I definitely wouldn't keep it. My guess is it's designed primarily to separate male and female - doing so with gender options, and then drilling down into personality options would seem to make a lot more sense.
I can understand that your app doesn't support the back button - but your UI needs to solve that problem for the user. Done shopping for mum and want to shop for dad? (Doesn't apply to mother's/father's day, but birthdays?) Refresh the page and start again.
An obvious issue is that father's day isn't supported. Fair enough that there's no personality filters, but looking briefly through all the items available, there are some clearly for men (Personalized Man Cave Doormats was on the first page). Why not show them?
Okay, so selecting mother's day instead, I can see why that's supported first since it's mother's day in America soon? Anyway, the options probably shouldn't be radio - mum could easily be awesome and a wine lover. The family gardener could easily imply outdoorsy. The hostess could easily imply wine lover. No need to model such connections, but let users select more than one.
The more serious issue is that the buttons don't work. Ubuntu Firefox 20.0, - Click mother's day, next question - Click 'An awesome mom' (all other buttons work fine), get gift suggestions Firebug info: POST: http://www.giftwell.com/discover/ Result: Internal server error. On your website, there's no result and I'm left assuming that button is broken. GET: http://api.mixpanel.com/track/?data=<snip>&ip=1&... Result: 1 (appears to be the same as successful requests) -- - Click any radio option button, get gift suggestions No POST request made http://api.mixpanel.com/track/?data=<snip>&ip=1&... Result: 1 (same as above) -- - Now, as a user I am left assuming that your form simply doesn't function. No button will work any more.
--------------------
Okay, so that's a bug, but it completely breaks the UX on what seems to be the primary user experience right now.
So going into mother's day, selecting a working button (wine lover), I get only 5 results. There's tonnes of space below, but no more results shown. I click show more results, and I get 5 more. How come these weren't shown before? If there's somewhere infinite scrolling should be used, it's here. Fix that view gifts button somewhere and just show me everything relevant.
Or, maybe don't. Right now the results simply aren't relevant. They change every time I visit the page from the same options, but one time I got a sun towel and then 4 wine products. The next time I got watches, succulents (never heard of these, from the picture china plantpots?) and 2 wine products. The filters definitely need work.
When I saw them succulents, I thought I'd click to see what they were. Fortunately, that opened a modal with a picture and some information. Unfortunately, when it was fully loaded it scrolled so I could only see the top (as much as fitted on my screen). I couldn't move the scrollbar in Firefox for some reason, and the modal didn't have a scrollbar. In short, I could see a bigger version of the picture, and knew some text was there because I saw it loading, but it's unusable.
When I closed the modal, I tried again. No luck, it just didn't open this time. There's a problem with your Javascript - I can only open one modal per visit.
In the no thanks, show me everything menu, I get, well, everything. There's no filters and no sorting. It's also a different experience, there's no consistency. This time there's no weird thing in the top right corner of every image (what is that by the way, it didn't do anything?), and there's a buy/save button when I hover over an image. I prefer this layout, not sure why it's different though. Also, the modal scrolled this time (it was a lot shorter, that could be the problem), but I could still only open one per visit.
-
Sorry to be so harsh, but as a user my experience on your website was broken, fragmented and confusing. I hope my feedback is useful, if you need any more information about anything I said (user feedback always misses important information, I doubt mine's an exception), let me know.
My best suggestion would be to simplify the concept, a lot. I would suggest infinite scrolling, show me the best stuff you've got as soon as I arrive and for as long as I want to keep looking. Or at least proper pagination, where I can go forward as well as backward. Then, add proper filters. Gender and age are an obvious start (you capture them to some extent in mother/father of course), and then drill down to personality. I'd use the same personality types in the same order for each, but adjust their names for gender/age (eg action man for young boys etc etc..). Or just use the same simple names. Make them checkboxes too, and have the items shown change as I change them.
That would solve a lot of the problems - inconsistency between filters, broken filters, not showing enough products, no proper pagination of results. I expect it'd be a lot more engaging too. I also imagine it would remove a lot of the requests to your server.
-
Overall, I like the concept, but I think the UX could be drastically improved by a focus on showing more (this could encourage better curation too?) and more general purpose, useful filters.