When I was brainstorming with the marketing team earlier this week about what company would be my next pick for my UX Review, I had been leaning towards reviewing a store – more specifically along the lines of fashion/clothing (the fashionista in me was bubbling). Immediately the team grinned and suggested the San Diego youth-fashion hot spot, Charlotte Russe.
CharlotteRusse.com along with the brick and mortar stores deliver style in clothing and accessories, providing an exciting, fashionable assortment of merchandise that compliments virtually every facet of our customers’ lifestyle. The stores provide fashion and lifestyle needs of young, fashion-conscious women in their teens and early twenties, offering trend right apparel and accessories at value prices.
Let’s take a look at CharlotteRusse.com and how they’re doing in usability and sociability since their launch 6 years ago. Headquartered here in San Diego – Charlotte Russe has undergone rapid expansion in the past couple of years – let’s see how the website is handling the growth.
Overall the brand is very powerful amongst the company’s demographic - women ranging from teens to early twenties. Women shop at Charlotte Russe because of what the brand delivers - stylish clothing and accessories for the fashion-conscious women in their teens & earlier twenties (24 is still early twenties, right?). Trendy apparel at value prices is the brand identity that resonates in a Charlotte Russe’s consumer’s mind.
Messaging: Instantly when I visit the site I understand Charlotte Russe. Trend setting models and pictures are the main focus on the homepage with an announcement explaining a current promotion. “SHORTS: Buy 1 get 1 free!†Wow if that isn’t value I don’t know what is – especially in the fashion world. They give me a call to action with “Shop Now†– well if I must…
Some other great messaging tactics at the bottom of the homepage tell me to visit the Fashion Lounge to see what’s hot, editor picks and how I can become a hot chic. How can I resist at this point? So I visit the Fashion Lounge and am immediately engaged with the features. Submit a photo and bio to become Hot Chic & win a $100 gift card, read editor picks from magazine clippings and see illustrations for 3 different ways on how to wear Refugee Crops. All of the messaging in this section is straight-forward and keeps me engaged.
Engagement Value: Like I stated above the engagement value in the Fashion Lounge is great. Not only can I submit my photo, bio, read more about the featured styles in magazines but I can also be taken to those items on their eCommerce section. In my opinion, that’s an easy conversion. You show the product in a real-life scenario, click on it with interest and throw it in the shopping cart within a few minutes of it drawing your interest.
The only thing I noticed in the Fashion Lounge was when I wanted to navigate to other sections of the Lounge with the navigation provided at the bottom of the page the link to “What’s Hot†wasn’t working. I suggest fixing that error immediately.
Fun: The site is definitely fun and has a unique personality. Each type of clothing has a different header image showcasing the in-style clothing, accessories, shoes, etc. The colors are bright and fun for the online shopper as well.
Quality of Material: Even with how fun and youth driven the site is, it’s still very professional and maintains the highest level of quality & security for its shoppers.
Style: Style is an integral part of Charlotte Russe and the site falls nothing short of that intention either. Their use of imagery, colors and text keep the site stylish, sleek and still comfortable for the online shopper.
1 Brand Strategy Recommendation
• Fix the link to the “What’s Hot†topic in the footer navigation
Overall, the social aspects of CharlotteRusse.com are pretty good even though there aren’t any social bookmarking components available for the community to run with. Here is my review of the social side of Charlotte Russe…
Viral Components: There are no social bookmarking, tagging or viral components offered on the site, currently. The site offers many options for visitors to rate clothing, submit feedback, and take surveys but nowhere are there social media options available to truly spread CharlotteRusse.com.
I would suggest taking a social media lesson from WetSeal.com. This competitor has a “My Boutique†feature which allows you to add clothes into a closet, mix and match pieces, purchase the outfit, tag, and send to a friend for review. I would totally buy that outfit! Maybe I will…
On CharlotteRusse.com you can send an item to a friend, which is nice but you can only send to one friend at a time (which is tedious) and who honestly knows their friend’s email addresses off the top of their head? I can’t even remember my own parents’ home phone number…sorry Mom!
Community: No community based around the site. At my initial review of the site I thought the Fashion Lounge was pretty cool, but there’s no community based around it. So where’s the point of community engagement, sharing and meeting? There is none.
Other Social Features: I would suggest including other social features like videos, pictures and blogs to the site to enhance the experience. CharlotteRusse.com could look into leveraging a “How do you wear Charlotte Russe?†video submission campaign. I can see this type of interactive marketing campaign going really far with their demographic.
3 Social Media Recommendations:
• Include a blog (don’t forget to allow comments!) to highlight latest trends, fashion week, video submissions, etc.
• Launch a video submission campaign and offer grand prize for most voted video
• Add in viral components for videos and blogs like digg, stumbleupon, reddit, del.icio.us, and facebook
Web Standards: Well, CharlotteRusse.com is using a table-less layout, which is apparently setup through a of CMS system and they’re still using tables in a bunch of locations like side navigation. Unfortunately, no one bothered to check the code because there are TONS of errors in validation, but most are for ampersand HTML entity errors so I guess isn’t too bad. Another thing I noticed - Ummm, tags go inside the tag, not between the DOCTYPE and the tag (http://www.charlotterusse.com/category/index.jsp?categoryId=2758878&clickid=header_footwear_button). Messy code implementation, lots of random in-line JavaScript and CSS definitions.
A good thing I noticed is that CharlotteRusse.com has a good use of multiple servers to help alleviate server load. They’re using a media server for image serving, CSS files, and most JavaScript files.
Analytics: Yes. CharlotteRusse.com is tracking through Omniture. They’re also using Feed Burner for RSS subscription tracking.
XML/RSS Feeds: Good use of RSS on the site: new arrivals alerts, product alerts, etc. Feed are clearly linked, no subscription required, include photos and pricing, and allow for easy integration into the user’s preferred feed reader.
SEO: CharlotteRusse.com has meta data (title, keyword and description tags) on the homepage but to increase the effectiveness of the SEO efforts Adding more content on the hompage that incorporates keyword-rich copy as the current homepage is using text as an image which cannot be indexed by search engines.
I took a look at the internal (clothing specific) pages as well and they’re using title/meta data for internal pages as well.
Browser Compatibility: Firefox, IE, No Mobile
Site Search: Search is actually pretty accurate and brings up very relevant and organized results. Some other helpful site search features include descriptive search terms in colors, “express shop”, and breadcrumbs which helps with navigation.
3 Technology Recommendations:
• Correct errors listed on XHTML and CSS errors (W3schools & W3C are great resources for proper code standards)
• Include keyword-rich copy on the homepage to assist in SEO efforts
• Add widget/mobile capabilities so people can access event info, updates, games, etc.
Design: For the most part, the design is clean and easy to flow through. However, I suggest doing a redesign of the Fashion Lounge. The graphics aren’t bad but the fuchsia bar that goes through each section of the Fashion Lounge is really annoying - perhaps using the icon at the bottom for each section that gets bigger with a mouse over would be more pleasing to the eyes.
Navigation: The links are not obvious enough they need rollover states or some visual indication of what is a link throughout the site.
Sitemap: CharlotteRusse.com has a site map. Today site maps are a common approach to facilitating navigation.
Survey Says: One last thing to note is that the survey is really bolt-on and out of place. If you click on the survey for any of the categories, it takes you to a completely generic layout being hosted by “Survey Monkey”. The survey doesn’t even do anything. It just takes you back to the page. No email follow-up, no re-direction to a page in the site that better suits your needs, no message even thanking you for the survey information. VERY poor implementation.
2 Functionality Recommendations:
- Redesign the usability & design in the Fashion Lounge
- Create obvious rollover states or visual indication of what a link is throughout the site
Brand Strategy - 4 Stars
Social - 2 Stars
Technology- 3 Stars
Functionality - 3 Stars
Overall the site has a lot of great features that keeps the shopping experience fun and allows shoppers to feel like a participant within the site. I wouldn’t necessarily say CharlotteRusse.com has a community around it but there is a definite potential for them to leverage their current user base and rally a community behind them. I would suggest focusing on social media marketing and community development. Incorporating additional interactive & viral features to the site (blogs, video submissions, competitions, other user generated content) with help to continuously grow and spread the word of the community. There’s definite potential to build upon the already strong brand and continue to build a loyal community of evangelists through innovative campaigns and a fun, functional well-oiled site
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Comments (4 comments)
Great review Sarah. I think your suggestion about adding a blog to the website is awesome. Even better and more creative is your idea for the “How do you wear Charlotte Russe?” It would definitely be a great marketing tool for them.
Lacy / June 26th, 2008, 12:18 pm / #
Hi Sarah,
We’re thrilled to have been selected for your UX Review blog as we’re always looking for external viewpoints on how we’re approaching our online endeavors, the more data we can get to help us catch up to the field the better off we’ll be. To correct your review I think its important to understand that we’re actually only a year old with our dedicated online initiative. We launched eCommerce July 12th of last year.
That being said, boy do we wish you’d waited a little while, hahahah. We’re actively engaged in so many interesting projects and I think you’ll find our site to soon be so much better. Actually, your comments were great validation for many of the initiatives we’ve been working to launch so thank you! A couple of these updates we’ve pushed live since your review are additions to our fashion lounge (design your outfit, coming soon and behind the scenes) and the launch of a mobile store, allowing customers to shop from their phones. Beyond what’s live, we are building out the designs for our MySpace and Facebook pages, redesigning our homepage, header/footer and fashion lounge as well as some other very interactive social tools we’ll be placing on the site and that I can’t talk about until they’re live.
While we were looking into many of the areas you suggested, there are also a few we haven’t been and you’re insight is a great help on adjusting our focus to make sure all are considered. Again, thank you for your expertise.
The one area I’d choose to disagree with you is on community. Looking at the online world as it’s presented to customers today we balked at idea of creating our own community, like that of wet seal, where a customer would need to register to participate. Our customers already manage numerous (MySpace, Facebook, email, IM, etc) online accounts or personas and we don’t want to add to that. Why not instead set ourselves up to leverage what she’s already built and be everywhere she is. Allow her to take us with her no matter which social networking account she’s perusing, mini blogger she’s updating her friends on or email account she’s checking. Through this approach we feel we can develop a much deeper relationship with her. A good example of our approach here is our design your outfitter feature where we partnered with Polyvore, a social design community. Would love to know your thoughts on our approach here.
Since I’ve rambled on enough already, I’ll stop. Thanks again for all the value you’ve provided with your review! We’re hoping to use it to create a better customer experience as we go forward and looking forward to continuing the discussion started here.
Craig Gillan, Director of eCommerce, Charlotte Russe
Craig Gillan / July 16th, 2008, 12:29 pm / #
Hey Craig,
Thanks for your (comprehensive) response! The 6 year “launch” is how old the website is - not when you launched the eCommerce for Charlotte Russe. Using a website diagnostic tool I can see that CharlotteRusse.com has been live for 6 years, 2 months, 21 days…etc. So based on that data I wanted to see how the site has progressed over the last 6 years. So using a website archive tool I was able to watch how the CharlotteRusse site has changed over the years - pretty cool!
I agree with you about giving the community embeddable widgets & other content to play with & place on their personalized homepage, Facebook, MySpace, etc. But you should offer these widgets on the CharlotteRusse site not just on MySpace & Facebook (branded for CharlotteRusse). For example, I think it would be really cool that after a girl buys her outfit online she can opt-in to create a widget of her latest purchases. Then she can embed it into her Facebook and share with her friends. At that point her friends will see how stylish she is, offer suggestions, and then go straight to CharlotteRusse.com to create their own outfit to share. There are SO many options that your design/dev team have for a widget campaign like this - voting, suggesting, sharing, etc. The ideas are endless for you!
In addition - it’s GREAT that you’ve provided your text crazy community with an SMS shopping feature. Perhaps that could be a follow-up review…?
It sounds like you’re on top of your game over there and you’ve really thought out your options for staying on the cutting edge of technology, innovations and your demographic. Congrats and good luck on the site redesign! Can’t wait to check it out.
Sarah Carr / July 16th, 2008, 1:02 pm / #
I love you clothing.
Melat Mekashu / August 20th, 2008, 11:53 am / #
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