Shutterfly.com

Background
Shutterfly provides digital printing services for digital photography. You upload a picture to their site, usually taken with a digital camera, or scanned in, and they can print it out. 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10 prints are available, and they will send it to you or your friends.

Being a photography buff, I wanted to check out their services and see the quality of their prints. I did finally place my order, so their site can't be that bad. They offer a pretty nice low-risk initial offer of 50 free prints for yourself, and 150 that can be sent to family and friends.

My problem with the site is not the actual service but the design and usability of the site. It is really poor, and obvious they have never watched a new customer browse their own site.

Round and Round Round and round we go where the link takes us nobody knows. My first problem was a navigation issue. Starting on the homepage, there is a big advertisement that grabs your attention for their free prints special. Underneath the ad image is a link saying "JOIN THE FREE FOR ALL TODAY", both are hot.

After clicking on this ad, which happened to be exactly what I was looking for, it takes you to a second page. This second page gave me a little more information about the special and encourages me to sign-up. This encouragement is with a big image that says "For your FREE PICTURES! click here". Perfect. I want to test this out. I want my free pictures, I clicked there.

It took me right back to the homepage. I was a little confused by this so I tried the process again. Clicking on ad for special takes me to the detail page about the special. Click on "For your Free Pictures" it takes me to homepage with the ad for the special.

I'm guessing I missed something on the detail page. So I go back and look it over a little more carefully. I see links aboue Privacy, and Term and Conditions and a link towards the top which says "More about Shutterfly". This sounds a little promising I want more info anyways. I click there and again I'm back at the homepage.

Pop Pop Pop-Up
I guess their designers really like the homepage. As I study the homepage I click a link that says "Tell Me More" and a small pop-up window hits me in the face. Surprised but not done yet I skim it and it describes the process and site fairly well.

So I want to sign-up and try the service, I finally locate the sign-up button towards the bottom of the page embedded in the look and feel of the site. I click and get another pop-up window with the sign-up form. I like to verify all sign-up forms are secure by seeing the "https" protocol in the location bar. I could not do this since it was in a pop-up and the location bar was removed. However, my browser's secrutiy icon told me it was secure, so I trusted it.

I signed-up for the service and was ready to upload an image. On the homepage I clicked the Upload Photos link, and bam another pop-up to sign-in. So I sign-in, pop-up disappers and main browser changes. I had a question about resolution and print sizes, so I went to their support page to see if they had an answer. Click the support page expecting a pop-up (help usually is in one) and it wasn't it changed the whole page. Shutterfly's support page did however answer all my questions.

I finally got my images uploaded and sent off to be printed. Hopefully the the quality of their prints is good, because I might use their service again, but not because of their site. Luckily for them I'm fairly patient and have heard enough about their site that I wanted to test their product. If I were a casual user the poor navigation and annoyance of pop-up windows would have "scared" me away.

Summary and Analysis
The problems with Shutterfly's site are fairly obvious. Their navigation takes you in circles which is very frustrating. Links need to be clear and take the user where he is expecting to go. Signing-up should be one of the easiest things to get to, but not so every link takes you to a sign-up page.

Get rid of the pop-up windows or at least cut them down to just the help page. Our desktop help systems got us familiar with pop-up help, it makes sense. Since you still have the problem in front of you and a help guide to assist in the problem. Sign-up forms, login pages, and others do not need pop-up windows. Especially when all they do is change the main browser window.

The Shutterfly site is fairly simple which is good. There are only a few things you would do there: Upload Photo, Order Print, or Share Photos. The site needs to keep it this simple and not scare away any new customers with poor design.

 

Related Links:

Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website
Jakob Nielsen is the premier web usability guru. He has written several books on the subject and his web site contains tons of valuable information in his bi-weekly alert boxes. If you want to learn more about usablity and the web pour over his site and read everything you can.