Japanese automakers may make good cars but their web site designs leave much to be desired, according to a new report from Forrester Research Inc.
While the web sites of four major Japanese automakers rank high on providing valuable content, poor navigation and presentation make content and function hard to find and consume, Forrester found. One flaw: page layouts fail to use space effectively or prioritize essential content and function.
“All of the automotive sites we evaluated wasted valuable space with oversized images, forcing users to hunt for decision support tools such as configurators and comparison engines,” the report says. “For example, Mazda’s home page is dominated by a cycle of emotive images, such as a profile view of a young woman’s face. But the car itself is hardly visible and navigation options are buried behind rollovers.”
The automotive sites also use text that is too small or too poorly contrasted to read, according to the report. In the case of Nissan, the dealer locator gives a map of nearby sales outlets and rich details about the facilities at each location but uses a faint gray, small type face that makes essential content hard to read, Forrester says.
Category and subcategory names also are unclear and overlap, making it difficult for new visitors to navigate the sites. “Instead of using clear names that contain key trigger words related to user tasks, Japanese automotive sites prefer to use menu titles that contain proprietary product names that mean nothing to first timers,” Forrester says.
Despite design flaws, the Japanese automotive sites provide abundant content and function, location cues that make user paths easy to follow, and site function that provides clear feedback, Forrester says.
Forrester based the report, “The State of Japanese Automotive Site Design, 2007,” on analysis of the web sites of Honda, Mazda, Nissan and Toyota.
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