For this month’s edition of the Usability Report Card we have chosen Quel Objet, a site specializing in French products for the home. Quel Objet means “what a thing” according to the site’s About Us page, and the site’s design shares the same funky vibe as their name.

Quel Objet doesn’t have any major usability flaws, but like most small online retailers there are a few identifiable problems that can be improved. Let’s get to it.

1. Quel Objet does a nice job of using their home page to feature products using large, colorful images. There is a flash promotion piece that rotates through 6 products and makes nice use of the top area of the homepage. The biggest problem with the homepage is the very small font size of most of the text. Text should really be 12 point font or larger.
2. Browsing Quel Objet is intuitive as the top nav shows the categories, displaying sub-categories below when you roll over. While the top navigation functions well and is very clean, I usually suggest using left hand navigation for categories and keeping the top nav for administrative links. As it is, Quel Objet has their administrative links (about us, customer information, etc.) on the very top of the page with the category navigation below. This results in a lot of visual noise, and as we will see in the checkout process, helps to lower the conversion rates.
3. Quel Objet does not have a search function on its site. Smaller online retailers sometimes forgo search because they figure they don’t have enough products to warrant the addition, but this is narrow minded. You need to design the site so that every customer, say a family member looking for a particular item to gift, can immediately find themselves at the product page without having to browse through categories. There’s no reason to not include search on a retail site.
4. Quel Objet definitely understands the depth vs breadth equation when creating sites. It’s more art than science, but finding the balance between having too many top level navigation links and having too much drilldown before you hit a product page is very important. The category pages are nicely laid out with sub-category links arranged in a grid format. There could be some confusion because links to sub-category links appear the same way that links to products do, but the layout definitely works overall.
5. Product pages on the site are cleanly designed and feature a prominent product image. Text is kept to the essentials, with the product title, a short description and the price being the only things a customer would have to read. This is of course somewhat inherent to the products Quel Objet sells, but keeping text blocks concise is a tenet of web design. One improvement would be to make the Add to Cart button larger, perhaps twice as large as its current size. The green button does stand out from the blue elements on the page, but for calls to action bigger is better.
6. The checkout process has one flaw so large it ensures an F. Once you add a product to the shopping cart the next step is checking out, but the Checkout button is separated from the shopping cart by the top navigation. Worse still, the Checkout button has a faded look to it. You want the Checkout button to be the first read on the shopping cart page, not the fourth or fifth read. The Checkout button should take the place of the Continue Shopping button, below the cart total, which you can see in the screenshot of the Quel Objet shopping cart.
7. Quel Objet does a nice job of communicating to the customer that help is only a phone call or email away. The store’s phone number is displayed in the header at all times, while a Contact link on the top navigation provides more complete information, including a physical address, which has been proven to alleviate customers’ concerns with online stores.
8. Quel Objet unfortunately doesn’t have error recognition for addresses, and while robust verification that will check zip codes against states is quite expensive, checking that zip codes are only numbers is quite easy for even limited budgets.

Overall Quel Objet comes through with a passing grade of C. The lack of search and the confusing layout of the shopping cart hurt the site immensely. Redesigning the shopping cart would have the greatest effect on the usability of the site and would surely improve conversion rates. Changing the shopping cart is understandably a daunting task for a small online business, but in this case it should pay itself off shortly.