A Vehicle Installation Service Site - Website UX Review

UX Expert Paul Boag reviews RS Connect (rsconnect.com), the website for a large company that provides specialized vehicle installation services. The site has a modern design with large videos playing in the background. Paul gives some excellent advice on how to use videos effectively, as well as feedback on the navigation, case studies, and the lack of a primary call to action.

Transcript below.

Topics covered in this video: Main navigation.

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Transcript

Hello. My name is Paul Boag and you're watching First Impressions video series produced in conjunction with the lovely people at Balsamiq. The idea of this series is that they send me different websites to review and I give my initial impressions on those websites. I've literally just loaded them in a browser and started the video and you will get my unedited opinions on these sites.

So, let's have a look at what we've got today. So, this is what they've sent through to me, RS Connect. Big video, very big hit as soon as you arrive on the site, that has a good impact and it gives a good impression of the kind of stuff they do without me having to read any text.

It looks like a kind of automobile type stuff, but it's not a, you know... It's a lot more sophisticated obviously than just your local mechanic. And I get all of that without having to read a word, which is a good job because actually, it's pretty hard to read that text sitting over the top of an image like that.

I think I'm going to have to highlight it in order to make it a little bit easier. Oh, actually, that's just made it harder to read. Okay. That didn't work. "Partnering with everyone from insurance, fleet managers, emergency services to hire and leasing companies. RS Connect is here to protect your drivers and vehicles applying our in-house engineering and vehicle installation expertise to drive down risk with integrated telemetric technology, keeping people safer at the wheel."

Okay. I'm guessing if I knew what integrated telemetrics were, then I would understand what they did. I'm guessing it's, you know, a technology that monitor the performance of vehicles. I can't help but feel beyond the obvious problem that we're having there of reading that text over the video that it couldn't be made shorter.

I feel like the first thing it needs to say is that they install and monitor telemetric technologies for people such as bullet point list of fleet managers, vehicle services, you know, etc. All right.

So, it's a little bit wordy and could be probably simplified down, but obviously, the biggest problem is this looping video. Don't get me wrong, I liked the video. It gave me an instant feeling of what they were offering and what they did but it's making it impossible to read the text on which it's sitting. So, maybe it runs, I don't know, whether you put the text in a block or something like that.

I'm not quite sure whether you use the video and, you know, something that's triggered by the user because the other problem is, is it created a bit of a performance problem loading the page. If we load the page again. So, it does this kind of fade in thing, which makes it feel a little bit sluggish. I'm torn over it because I, you know, one hand on do like the video content, but having stuff overlaid like that is just not working for me.

Okay. Let's have a scroll down and see what else we've got going on here. So, "About the company," "What we do," "Our approach." "At the cutting edge of driver and vehicle safety." See, again, there's a lot of text there. I don't think I'm going to read all of that text.

Companies they work with. This is good. Okay. You know, those are good names. I think I would move that up maybe more. And they supply emergency services as well. Okay.

I'm beginning to get a bit of feel for what these guys do. Right. Let's have a look at the navigation. All right. We've got quite a lot going on on this navigation bar here. Oh, even more when you start rolling over. Okay.

So, "What we do." Now, here we go. See, again, what's happened here is that we've hidden what the company actually does underneath a rollover, okay? These sets of things that they do, need to be front and center down here somewhere so I can instantly see what this company is about and what, you know, makes them tick because it looks like, you know, I took away that they just did telemetrics.

But it looks like they actually do more than that, right? Let's have a look. I might be wrong. Ooh. Oh no, more video. Oh dear. Okay.

Well, let's come back to that in a minute. And also, notice they've got that nice fade-in on the page load, but it actually, I kind of understand it from a design aesthetic point of view because you've got to load the video up. And so, you don't want the video, you know, to have a gray background or whatever and then the video to knock in. But having that fade up means that you've got this delay that's happening, this perceived delay of the page loading, right?

Because it's got to wait for the video, then fade in. What you're better off doing is taking the first frame of the video and having that load in as a low-resolution background image and then replacing it with the video because then the text will appear quicker and the user can start reading quicker. "Fleet services and installation is the largest and most established fleet installation solution across [inaudible] parallel products or services catalogued..." Okay. Fair enough. It looks like they install lots of different things, not just telemetrics. Yeah, look, here we go. "Telemetrics safety. CCTV cameras, lighting."

See, I didn't get any of this from that homepage. I just got the telemetric stuff. So, and again I've got to wait for that page to load up. Oh, the video has dis... Oh no. Then the video's back. Okay, so, the fading isn't even just related to the video.

Okay. So, they need to make it much, much clearer what they actually are delivering, what their services are because they've obviously got quite a lot of services going on. Again, I've got to wait for the page to load up. So, what do they do? Emergency services.

So, even the "what we do" isn't actually what they do because these are who they do it for. Fleet services, emergency services, connected car. These titles are not particularly descriptive.

Okay. So, you know, they're talking about a connected car, but what does that mean? What is it about the car that's connected? The best one I saw was the fleet services where it listed the specific, you know, things that they're adding, which is, you know, your telemetrics, your safety features, your lighting, your fuel, your security.

That feels like more what they do. And then there's who they do it for, which is a kind of different question. This loading is really getting annoying, isn't it? "Huge range of car entertainment system." So, basically, anything technological they put in vehicles.

What's Line-X? So, it's a coating. Okay. Perhaps that's an industry thing. Perhaps that's my ignorance of the industry. This is where, you know, usability testing with people who actually know what they're talking about, you know, know the industry, would be a potential customer, makes a huge difference rather than just having a plebe like me look at it.

So, I think what we're saying so far, just to recap, we've got the performance issues of the way that the pages are loading in. We've got the video which is proving problematic and seems to be used not just on the homepage, but any of these top-level sections seem to be coming with the video as well which is problematic not only because it's hard to read the texts on it on top of it, but because it's actually quite just distracting generally.

So, and then what we're saying is that the "what we do" needs to be much clearer and much more upfront to say exactly what kind of things that they add to vehicles. You know, what they're trying to do is they're trying to kind of talk about, you know, the benefits, drive down risk, and I'm kind of okay with that.

I think, you know, you do want to emphasize the benefits, but you've also got to clearly say what your features are, what it is that you're delivering. Let's have a look at "Our Approach." See, that is just a big old chunk of text there to read. And it's also centered as well which makes it harder to read.

I quite like "Our Values." That's quite nice. But with values, you've got to ask yourself, you know, "Would anybody say the opposite of what you're saying?" Right? So, they've got values, like "Honesty is the cornerstone of our business." Nobody's going to say, you know...

That almost goes without saying because nobody's ever going to say, "Well, dishonesty is the way that we do business," you know? So, your values have got to actually stand for something which, at the moment they're a little bit on the weak side. We've also got quite a lot, as I was saying before I got distracted, quite a lot of different navigational items being pulled in here and not all of those navigation items are equally important.

So, for example, really, jobs and recruitment, you can make people look a little bit harder for that one. So, that could be, you know, sitting down in the footer somewhere. It doesn't need to be up here. "About," people often aren't that interested in "About" beyond the, Are these guys going to go out of business and are they reliable?

See, things like "Our Story, and "Our History," people don't care. They don't care about that. They just need to know, you know, "Who do you work with? How trustworthy are you?" So a lot of that stuff can be stripped out, to be honest. And management team, you know, they don't really care that much about who your management team is either.

So, again, "About Us" could probably come out of that main navigation section. So, then you'd end up with, "What we do, Our approach." Case studies are really important. Let's have a look at that because it's a service-based business. It's who you've worked with, you know, how trustworthy you are. Show me all what these features.

Well, that's just reloaded what I already had. What if I click on one of these? Okay, so very light on case studies. It just seems to be, you know...

I expected to see client names here, and instead what I'm seeing is just kind of a load of text. So, yeah, I think there's some nice clear case studies because on the homepage they've got all of these logos of the different companies they've worked with, you know.

And I want to know, What did you do for the RAC? What did you provide them? What did you provide TESCO's bank, what did...? You know, give me a testimonial of, you know, what TESCO's bank thought of working with you and what the experience was like. That was what I was expecting to find on case studies and I didn't find anything on that.

So, it's very, very light on that. Let's have a look at "News," to see what's in here. Yeah. So, it's a fairly generic kind of blog kind of information. Okay. So, what I think, these kinds of, you know, do I care that they've got a new IT manager?

You know, how does that help me? What benefit is that to me? Really, I'm not a fan of news sections, full stop. If you look at your analytics, almost always they get very little traffic to them. I would replace that news section with an advice section, right? That answers fundamental questions like, "What do you need to think about if you're considering adding telemetrics to your car?"

You know, "How do you ensure the driver experience is safer?" You know, articles and advice is what people are looking for rather than news. News actually has very little value in most situations. So, let's have a look at what this Academy is. Okay.

So, they provide courses and training as well. Now, that's quite interesting. So, I mean... I kind of, yeah, and it's giving you an idea, a vague idea of what the courses cover.

I think if you're going to include stuff on training, there needs to be a lot more detail about, you know, what kind of training, what the benefits of the training are. This feels very lightweight in terms of the amount of information that you're providing on this. So yeah, it's a very...

It's definitely got good things about it, this website. But I think there's still quite a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of breaking up some of that copy, improving the performance, knocking back, or using those videos in a much more lightweight way, expanding out your case studies, making it much clearer what you do straight off of the bat, providing more information about how that works.

Because I mean, if you go into something like fleet services, for example, you know, actually that's not a lot of information about telemetrics or about safety, you know. You know, we need a lot more information about what's your process, how do you go about deciding what's the right thing for my particular business, you know, what budgetary considerations should I make?

They almost need to... I feel like on this website, they need to sit down and write a list of questions that users will have and make sure they're addressing them all. But that doesn't mean that you need big, long blocks of text on the screen at any one time. You can break it up into bullets and you can, you know, make it interactive and even put it under different tabs like they've done here.

You know, all of those things will make it much more engaging. You know, they're beginning to do it kind of here but I think they need to go further, add in more detail. The other thing that they seem to be lacking is they seem to be lacking any clear call to action.

I'm guessing that this website primarily exists to be a, you know, to be a lead generation. So, people are expected to contact them at the end of it. I'm just going into one of their... See this is the actual services that they offer now. Insurance telematics, fleet telematics, I don't know what the differences between the two is, but that might be my ignorance...aftermarket.

Right. Okay. Yeah. So, so the primary call to action is probably to contact them yet contact is just, you know, one little link in the top right-hand corner of the entire site as far as I can see it. And there's no real kind of, you know, "Hey, get in touch. We really do want to hear from you."

There's no kind of encouragement of that. Let's actually see what the contact page is looking like. Okay. Somewhat minimalistic to say the least, right? So, there needs to be a lot more advice about next steps, you know, "We want to hear from you. Feel free to contact us in any one of these many different ways." Draw people in a lot more.

What's the experience going to be like? If I hire you, how's it going to work? How are we going to interact with one another? And then that leads you all nicely through to this moment where you book, you know, a call with us and we begin that journey together, right? So, let's recap as we wrap up this video, what we can learn from RS Connect.

I think we can learn that video is a great and powerful tool, but we need to use it carefully so that it doesn't become too distracting. We've learnt that we need to simplify our navigation down and focus the user on what the services that you offer, right?

And then answer the users' questions about those services, okay? That people don't want to know about your history and your background, they just want to know whether you are going to deliver a great solution, whether you are trustworthy, and whether you're going to be around for the duration. So, testimonials and case studies are hugely important in doing that and that needs to be a big part.

And then finally that, you know, if you've got a lead generating website like this one, it needs to have a clear call to action that takes people on the next step of their journey engaging with you, and you've got to layout exactly what that journey's going to be like. So, this is an attractive, modern site that does a lot right. But as with any site, there's always more that can be done.

And I look forward to seeing what the next generation of their website looks like. But until then, thanks very much for watching and goodbye.

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