River Island redesigned in Flash

River Island have redesigned their website in Flash.

Whoops, not the smartest move.

You can tell that they don’t really ‘get it’ from this:

Guy Lister, marketing director at River Island, said: “We wanted to provide an online experience that represents the way people like to shop when they visit our stores…”

Excuse me for stating the obvious, but shopping online is not like shopping in a store!

When you try to do e-commerce in Flash, it just breaks the basics of the user experience:

• my back button doesn’t work so I have to rely on the controls they’ve put inside the Flash, which slows me down. And in Flash, there’s no forward button so the navigation just feels broken.
• if I’m looking at a product that I like, I can’t copy and paste the URL and email it to my mum so she can buy it for me for Christmas. I can’t even bookmark the page.

This is all basic, basic stuff which I thought us web designers had got sorted out years ago. But I’m glad their marketing manager likes it. I wonder what his reaction will be when he compares notes with any other highstreet retailers about conversion rates and other KPIs?

Comments

[Ash]

I agree... Its a bit of a Boo.com isn't it..

Its particularly stupid in that you can actually make Flash do the things you suggest, like back/forward buttons and "tell a friend" type things.. That this usability has not been inbuilt is rubbish... Plus you have to activate the bloody thing (Thanks Microsoft) before you can do anything... There are workarounds to avoid this ... Why were these not implimented?

This site really doesn't offer anything particularly useful by being a Flash site.. It is pretty static and the clothes look much as they would on an HTML site.. This leads to the question, why the hell did they use flash? I would guess that the answer to this is probably "because its all whizzy bangy and will impress people".....

Er... It didn't impress me, and I have been designing flash sites for years, as you know.

I can see the point in using Flash for high-end marketing or to back up a TV campaign.. The web can almost be used in a similar way to TV advertising these days... Even being a Flash evangelist I am not stupid enough to try and build a site which needs to be accessible and usable using Flash.

So... River Island's flashy new site

er 3/10