OCUK's new website

**Disclaimer - I work in tech consulting but do not profess to be a design\dev\UX expert**

I've been using the site for years, and it did need updating. It was dated for mobile use, and not the quickest to work with, with a hit/miss search facility. Particularly with the parent company running a different ecommerce platform, it made sense to update. I'm all for change.

Visually what has happened though, is that the OCUK/CK web team (or 3rd party contractor) very hastily re-skinned the caseking.de theme to bring platform parity, and didn't really test this through thoroughly enough or announce with customers to help with the migration process. As a result, the colours in the theme are a bit too strong (as many have said) and a few areas haven't been rebranded ('Rainforest' sign-in info still auf deutsch, some titles/meta still Caseking branded etc). It not deal breaking, but it is frustrating and as a result does make learning the new browsing experience less pleasant than it should, and will inevitably irk the anti-change brigade more than it reasonably should.

The major sin here for me is not using the opportunity to upgrade both OCUK and caseking to a better theme from the perspective of customer experience. I'm sure there are valid backend/inventory/fulfillment reasons as to why this particular platform was chosen, but the lack responsive design to cater for mobile/tablet friendly display formats (and for ultrawide/high resolution browsing - I imagine a good number of customers view the site at above 1080p?) and the missed opportunity to streamline/improve the shopping experience seems negligent and poorly thought through.

The Sunday launch seems odd, as there were no OCUK support staff working to answer queries and lack of info for forum members about free shipping, accounts moving etc was surprising. This didn't feel like the OCUK we know and love.

Themes change, technology changes. A bit of post launch triage will fix the apparent problems. It's the service, people and ethos that keeps me personally as a customer anyway. Don't expect that will have changed.
 
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My eyes actually hurt, terrible doesn't do it justice.

It looks like a modern day version of those late 90's websites with 10,000 gifs. Like somebody just got a copy of Frontpage/Dreamweaver and went crazy.

The way the colour's clash, the way everything seems to be independently shaded, the way it looks busier than a dodgy site that's 90% adverts. Managing to go from having one of the best/cleanest web shops going to having one that looks like an overzealous first year web development student wanted to showcase all their "skillz" is quite impressive.
 
Dave M said:
Deja Vu: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17635849

You'll love it in a month - trust me :p
Click to expand...

A month won't fix it failing to meet any usability criteria at all, nor will it fix it using unsupported interactions for lots of devices nor will it cease being stupidly heavy to load and reloading way too often. We may get used to the gradients but it'll still be a badly-conceived site.

On not using screen real-estate for bigger monitors: I'd have thought OCUK of all places might try to make good use of super-wide screens etc (again, responsive design means you don't need more than one site to support things like this) - of course, given the currently level of clutter I'd imagine unless there was a design philosophy change using more space would simply mean more clutter so maybe we're really lucky!

Edit: I'm all in favour of companies updating their sites & OCUK needed updating, but making it less usable seems a poor option to me. I don't use touch devices to browse for components anyway, though the extra clicks to get places will result in my casual browsing being done elsewhere - not that this translates to sales, when actually buying I always shop around anyway.
 
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If you HAD to use the same web site as your parent company for "reasons" then you should have used the same site as them, not ham fistedly butcher it into a "dark theme" monstrosity. The Caseking site may not be as good as the old OCUK site but it looks infinitely better than this mess...
 
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