Homepage

The homepage is similar to the old version, though the options at the top are more precise (e.g. ‘clothing’ is now split out into ‘men’s’, ‘women’s’ and ‘kids’’).

It also uses more white space to help break the page up, whereas the previous iteration has an illustration of the outdoors in the background.

Furthermore the tiles under the carousel now lead to clothing ranges instead of specific products.

However the product carousel is still the most prominent feature, which may not be such a good idea. We recently investigated the use of carousels in ecommerce and overall the results weren’t very encouraging.

There are a number of usability issues, including the patience required to watch them revolve, and a case study from the US found that a carousel displaying five slides was only only clicked on by 1% of site visitors, with the first slide bagging 84% of those clicks.

Therefore, Millets should track how often the feature is used to decide whether it’s worth giving over so much space on its homepage.

Product page

The product pages tick a lot of boxes for best practice – there are several product images, a zoom function, stock information, and the ‘Add to basket’ call-to-action stands out from the rest of the page.

However there are also a few improvements that could be made. For example, Millets advertises the fact that it offers free delivery on all orders over £50 at the top of the page, but the pale grey colour makes it easy to miss.

Also, product reviews are a hugely important sales driver on ecommerce sites yet the link to reviews is quite small.

Millets could encourage customers to leave reviews by changing the text to ‘Be the first to write a review’ or by allowing people to just give a star rating rather than taking time to write a full review.

Finally, though the product description is thorough it is quite dry and longwinded. The copywriters should perhaps consider using bullet points, and avoid starting every sentence with ‘The North Face Evolution’.

Shopping basket

When you click the ‘Add to basket’ CTA you are immediately linked to the shopping basket, with the emphasis clearly on getting you to the checkout as soon as possible.

The most prominent CTA on the page direct you to the ‘secure checkout’ (bonus points for security reassurances) while the ‘Continue shopping’ button is a dull grey.

It also offers a neat summary of your order including an image, the estimated delivery time and cost, a status bar showing you how many steps to completion, and numerous security reassurances.

Checkout

Millets has stripped down its checkout to just two pages and avoids any mention of registering an account.

Too much form filling, forced registration and hidden delivery costs are some of the main causes of basket abandonment, so Millets has done a great job by avoiding these mistakes.

It also offers several user shortcuts, including a postcode lookup tool.

However one of the best touches is that it gives you real time advice on filling in personal details as you click on each new field – and if you miss a field you get a warning in red.

Unfortunately it loses points at payment stage as you aren’t offered the choice of using anything other than a credit card, and the design is inconsistent with the rest of the checkout process.

Even so, it’s still a very quick checkout process with very few barriers to purchase.

In conclusion…

Overall Millets’ new website is extremely simple to use and making a purchase only takes a few minutes.

The basket and checkout process does a great job of summarising the product details, costs and delivery times, while form filling is kept to an absolute minimum.

It also gives useful tips during the checkout process so the user always knows what is expected of them.

That said there are improvements that could be made. For example, I’m not convinced about using a carousel on the homepage and the review system and descriptions on the product pages could be tightened up.

But the main problem is that the site isn’t mobile optimised. At this stage, if a business is planning to overhaul its ecommerce platform then a mobile optimised site should be one of its main concerns.

Millets has missed a trick here, and it will be interesting to see if a mobile site is rolled out in the near future.