White Stuff website review

Published on 9^th July 2009 in Usability, Websites, tagged White Stuff.

White Stuff is probably one of the best kept secrets on the high street, having gone from a small skiwear retailer to a very profitable upmarket outfitter. They have dozens of shops across the country, but don’t advertise and avoid opening stores in any shopping centres. Their quirky marketing – they used mannequins with squirrel heads last winter – and great clothes have kept their customers coming back, but how does their website stack up?

The good

The first thing to note is that White Stuff’s branding has been carried across to the website very successfully. The same casual language and tongue-in-cheek humour from their other marketing material is present, particularly once you venture further into the website.

It’s relatively easy to find your way through to the product listings using the main navigation and once you get there, items are sensibly categorised. The site makes good use of breadcrumbs to let people know where they are within it and allow users to reach pages from more than one likely route. For example, it’s possible to view ‘his accessories’ by navigating through ‘his stuff’ or ‘accessories’.

The product pages are well laid out and if you mouse over the item’s picture, a zoomed-in portion of it appears to the right. This doesn’t always work immediately after the page has loaded, but clicking the image opens it up in a new window. Either way, it’s essential to have this higher resolution photo for customers ordering online, as this helps negate the fact that they can’t touch or otherwise examine clothes in greater detail.

The not so good

However, White Stuff’s website has a number of issues which detract from the experience. First of all, there’s an over-reliance on large clickable images. These make the site attractive and afford their graphic designers a great deal of freedom, but they make navigation unnecessarily difficult. There’s no hover effect on the images apart from the change of cursor and the borders of these clickable areas are sometimes unclear. Thankfully there are alternative text links in a more traditional navigation menu on the left hand side of many pages.

There’s also a lack of page navigation at the bottom of each product listing page. This seems initially trivial, but is likely costing White Stuff sales. Consider the high summer page; when I first visited this, my attention was drawn to the clothes and I then scrolled down. However, once I reached the bottom, I went to another section, unaware that there were more items to view. If the page navigation was more obvious and was also at the bottom of the page, I’d be much more likely to click through to the other pages.

Of course, I haven’t properly tested the site, but if you did an eye tracking study or looked at the sales of items on the subsequent pages, I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t a huge drop off after that first page.

Conclusions

The White Stuff website provides a generally good experience for customers buying and researching clothing online. It retains the fun and quirky branding that makes the company stand out and has a number of features which make the process easier. However, the large image links can be tricky to use and the page navigation has much room for improvement. With a few small adjustments, the White Stuff website could go from simply “good” to great.