Here at Best Buy, we encourage open and transparent engagement with our employees, customers and business partners. We call it our Open Principles. It essentially means that great ideas can come from anywhere and that if you listen to your customers intently and engage with them in what is meaningful, then you can create greater mutual benefit for both you and your customers.
We are embracing this approach in many parts of our business. Over the last 6 months, we have been working to deliver a new web experience at Insignia, one of our private label brands. When we set out to refresh Insignia’s web presence, we engaged directly with our customers and employees through the use of social tools. This enabled us to reach brand and Internet advocates with a passionate point of view, engage with their ideas, and rapidly iterate the web site based on how the community wanted to experience the brand.
As a result of this engagement, we built a site that is focused on product support and that is powered by authentic transparency (through social tools). Some key elements of the new site are an Insignia blog, a user forum (powered by Lithium), user reviews from bestbuy.com and a direct link to all the You Tube reviews of our Insignia products.
We are now reaching the final stages of testing prior to launching the site. In continuing with the open approach to site development, we are inviting our customers, employees and partners to participate in usability testing. There are two ways to participate. You can leave your comments here directly, or you can take the survey at http://tinyurl.com/czdpfk. You will need www.insigniaproducts.com open in a separate browser. All survey responses should be completed by EOD on May 8th. I would appreciate any comments that you have.
I’ll be interested to see how this impacts Insignia’s reputation within Best Buy retail locations.
Nice looking site. Here are my thoughts.
The immediate general feeling I get is that spacing is off. Pictures are extremely large for a site of this type. There is a lot of white space. For instance, in ‘televisions’ there are just three TV’s across the screen. This would make sense if your audience is in store or at a kiosk, but not for the home user. I get the sense of a firm that was trying to make itself appear larger than it is by “filling” space.
Why is social a section on the site? Why isn’t social interwoven in the fabric of the site.
1. If I just look at products, I have no sense of the community.
2. If you are truly trying to integrate social capabilities, shouldn’t they be immersive throughout the entire site? The TV product page should have integration with blogs and comments. Amazon has a good start here with reviews, but you could go much further.
Your forums section needs cleaning up. Bit cluttered there.
Pages like this (http://community.insigniaproducts.com/insignia/board?board.id=FAQ-computers) really confuse me. Explain what I just saw here.
If you’re trying to make a big splash in social, why not feature it with the landing page? Have a “what’s being discussed now” section (moderation would be good).
I am your target audience. I think a social electronics site would potentially engage me. This site has potential, but it needs a few iterations to get there.
Best of luck. Love the idea.
I agree with a lot of Rob S’s points regarding layout and social experience.
The layout is airy and makes it feel like there aren’t a lot of Insignia products and that it’s a small brand. The banner atop the Televisions selection with the guy fully extending his arm toward the TV and still having a ton of wall that the viewer is looking at sort of exemplifies the issue.
Robert Scoble recently had an article wondering why BBY spends so much energy segregating its social/web 2.0 elements from its sites. Why are all the social interactions happening in a back room of sorts instead of on the same page? As an employee who has seen BBY develop its web presence over the past decade, I’ve never understood why each brand needs to have its own independently operated web site. Why isn’t there better BBY.com integration where BBY.com acts as a hub and a site like this as a spoke with unified log-ins and credentials, instead of having to re-sign up?
When you go to customer reviews, it transforms (you can almost hear the sound . . . ) into this rather bland looking BBY.com intermediary page that doesn’t look very inviting, nor does it flow very well visually from the Insignia page.
Having used web fora for 11 years now, going to the Insignia forum was a bit of a ‘Gah!’ moment. Very few pictures, tons and tons of words, not very inviting at all. Having English and Spanish forums on the same page just bloats the page (just have a ‘Language Preference’ toggle on sign-up). If I were a casual internet-goer, this page would scare me out of using it. I can see the intent in having all those options to try and make it easier for people, but less is really more here.
This new beta is a huge step up from the current site and a good leap over the version that was shown on BSN a few months back, so I wish you the best of luck. It seems like many of the issues that hinder this site are common across all of our online entities, so if we solve one, we solve many others, too.
What the hell am I supposed to do initially? I’m confused. The site is about products, right? The social stuff just seems forced. My take away is that I’m supposed to be impressed by the products simply because they’ve been influenced by users. Isn’t that the case for most products? It’s really heavy handed. Stylistically, it doesn’t look modern or forward leaning or friendly. I know that social technologies are high on your radar, but please, make sure that it’s appropriate. Maybe it is for this, it just isn’t being executed in a way that makes it seem so.
Barry–
Visited insigniaproducts.com. Nice looking site.
Specific Thoughts:
Links to YouTube videos w/ reviews — A+, brilliant
User Form — F, pointless. Any forum worth its weight is brand agnostic. Take avsforum.com for instance, some threads run 750,000 posts long. That’s right, three quarters of a million. And, its full of experts. Why would they join the insignia forums? If they buy an insignia set they’ll talk about it where they already live–they already are.
Figure out how to engage existing community instead of starting your own.
To me, authentic transparency is more about humility, voice and presence than a location. We should figure out how to engage the existing communities that already discuss our product. Lets join them, be honest with them about our stuff and be a good listener and add value when appropriate. With time we’ll build credibility, their trust and their business.
Spence
What an interesting way to get feedback.
Here are some of my thoughts:
* I’m not a fan of Flash, especially on a home page. Slow to load. The delay in dropping down the menus of your top navigation was unsatisfying. (Also, your home page has thrown my Mac into a work-extra-hard-run-the-fan mode that I associate with poorly authored Flash.)
* The fonts used in the primary nav (Products, Support & Service, Our Story) are too small. I was also thrown that there is no drop-down for “Support & Service”. I kept waiting for it. Bug, or as designed?
* I don’t recommend three buttons that say “Click Here”. Users on the web know they can click on buttons. Since the buttons are big and easy to read, they should contain your call to action. Maybe “See products”, “Tell us”, and “Get help”?
* When I clicked on the first box at the bottom labeled “New Products” I didn’t expect to be taken to a blog. Change title to better set expectations?
* In the products area, I much prefer a layout where I can see all products of a type (like all TVs) on the page at the same time rather than having to page through them. You only have 4 TVs, but I can’t see them at one time. It is much easier to scroll down, and center my window on the products than to page back and forth. Also, the “Show discontinued products” was a very visible button, but can’t be one of the most frequent tasks. I would suggest a simple grid that can show all your TVs, with a simple link (rather than button) below that says “Show discontinued products”. I would like to be able to compare a couple of products to understand the differences. (Do all sizes of TV have the same number of inputs, or do I have to choose a bigger TV to get more HDMI ports?)
* Font sizes for the pages and page arrows in products are VERY small, and therefore more work to hit. This is the way you expect me to navigate through the items, they need to be big and easy. (Similar complaint that the font sizes on the list of product features is just too small.)
* I was thrown that when I selected “Help me find my product” and the main area in the center was all about troubleshooting and help. I wasn’t looking for help. I was expecting a wizard to help me select the best TV for my needs.
* In the products section, the pretty banner that says “Portable Audio” across the top is so tall that the pricing information on the products is “below the fold”. So now I have to scroll down.
Overall, I’d focus on these themes:
* increase the font sizes to make it easier to read and easier to click on
* minimize clicks by showing more items at once and getting important info above the fold
* carefully evaluate the use of Flash
* make sure labels and buttons are clear, so that I get what I expect when I click (surprises are bad)
* elevate frequently used tasks (and move less frequent tasks out of the way)
Good luck with your redesign. (I went through a major one last year.)
–Margret
http://www.twitter.com/tivodesign
The site does not fail gracefully in the absence of Javascript and Flash. A growing number of security-aware, technically sophisticated, users are blocking both technologies for sites that are not trusted, due to concerns of Cross-Site Scripting attacks and similar classes of vulnerabilities. It would be excellent if the animated Flash image defaulted to a static image, and the Javascript drop-down menus defaulted to links with the menu items on the target page. It doesn’t need to be a pretty as the full-featured site, but it would be nice if it worked.
Incidentally, this applies to the main Best Buy page too, which has similar issues.
I agree with Spence’s comments. This beta is certainly an upgrade, yet an expected upgrade. Think of it as your necessary evil product site. I won’t go into the creative aspects as a few here have done a good job offering insight. I will emphasize, however that going forward into the near future, it is now all about “off of site” and being where your customers already are. Marketing efforts need to aggressively focus on experience distribution and customer ID mobilization. Statistics show in great favor that your customers are engaged almost entirely in other social platforms. You need to consider quickly as a phase 2 how to reach them there, not at your site. Get help from partners on how best to build the appropriate monitoring and platforms to create trust and loyalty in your customer base online.
The idea of connecting the product to a social media platform is very powerful. However, it’s unclear to me how the two fit together to inform product development or the actual offering. This doesn’t feel different than other commerce sites that offer ratings/reviews and other consumer feedback. It has a very traditional retail sensibility about the design, navigation and detail pages. From an execution standpoint, I would like to see the product navigation and features should integrate the feedback and other community elements much more strongly. There’s a lot of power in that idea.
Threadless has always been the standard bearer for social commerce. Given the category, that’s not an approach that would work for electronics. So the question will become over time, what’s the reason to believe for members of the community? How can they really see their feedback in the product or the experience? Starbuck’s collects ideas that go through a formal process for evaluation and feedback to the entire community. The community builds on the ideas and collaborates. And users can see directly how the idea evolves with Starbuck’s.
Best Buy is in a stronger position than most retailers to leverage this idea. I look forward to seeing how the organization evolves this effort – it’s clearly on the right path.
One of the ways that I’ve seen other sites be transparent is to actually list competitors. For example, on Target’s website – when you’re shopping for cameras they have google ads for competitors. By doing this, you not only consolidate the work for customers who are doing research but you’re also being transparent about your product, prices, etc. If Insignia wants to build a reputation for quality then as a consumer, I would want to see how the specs compare to a name brand like Sony, Samsung, etc. on the product-listing pages. Being able to see the side-by-side comparison would be helpful.
In addition, if the site is meant to drive engagement from customers in terms of product innovation and development I didn’t see examples of how real-customer input has resulted in actual products. If you’re asking me the consumer to contribute my ideas and are serious about taking customer feedback into account the site should show examples of that – of the entire cycle from input to creation.
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