First impressions

As first impressions normally say a lot about a product, or in this case website, these were immediately written down before doing anything else.

General Style

Upon opening the Velvet site, the general style of the site sets the tone for the whole website experience. The main issue is that this general style does not seem to exist for the Velvet site. They use a lot of different fonts without a clear meaning or structure behind it. Even the fonts in the logo can not be found anywhere else in the website. Also the typing is very small, which probably makes it difficult to read for for example older people.

Furthermore the colours used in the pages are a lot of different shades of the same base colour. None of these shades are used in the logo though. Again no logic can be found which would explain this. The colours are in such low saturated shade that together with the small letters make the website look old-fashioned. Put on the dark background of the site the colours furthermore have a very low contrast. This does not improve the ease of reading.

Last the website has slight differences in different browsers. For example in Google Chrome it provides you with information about the encrypted connection and the sidebar buttons have rounded corners, in Mozilla Firefox this encrypted connection information is missing and the corners are non-rounded.

Home page

When shifting from their basic Dutch site to English a blue screen with the word ‘English’ in the middle fills the screen for a few seconds. This makes the site feel very cheap and badly made. After this screen users see a big empty spot where probably an image is loading, this loading hawever takes about 20 minutes. Without the images this page is mostly a lot of text and again very old-fashioned looking. Some people actually thought at first that this was an error message. As soon as the image does load though, it looks quite a lot better.

On the home page the first thing you see and really catches the eye is the shopping cart. This feels very unpleasant as people are immediately confronted with paying. Furthermore the shopping cart and search engine are styled in such a way that they look like they might be advertisements, because they do not match the site.

On the side of the page a lot of buttons can be found with a lot of very different functions, which in other sites can partly be found on the top of the site in the ‘Pages’-bar. This would really improve the usability of the website, as it shortens the time one needs to find some of the main functions (contact, stores etc. ). These buttons have different functions as well. Some are dropdown menus and some are direct links. Even though this is made clear with icons for the dropdown menus, it probably feels very strange to the user.

Also the buttons on the side of the page change colour when the user is about to click them. This makes it clear which button will be selected but creats use of even more colour shades. The buttons have different colours and some of the buttons have similar colours to the colour of the start screen. Users can get the impression that these few buttons correspondate with the selected page. 

CD info page

This page is reached by the users when they first go from the Home page to the CD page and then click on a specific CD. This page includes a table with a lot of space for information including the price and release date, which is usely partly empty, the front of the CD cover, a box for facebook comments on the CD, other titels of this musician/band and last the tracklist. The page has a lot of information, which most users would probably not want or need. Also the table lay-out makes it look very business like, instead of like a page for leisure, which it’s supposed to be.

The main part of this page has a white background. This makes it stand-out of the main site so much, that it feels like a copied Word document page in the page. This looks very fast made and cheap. Some one mentioned the order in which part of the information is displayed feels backwords. The more interesting information like the track list is in the bottom and the less interesting is more on top.