Money Supermarket launch beta website redesign

It’s the end of the final quarter of the year. The car insurance traffic is low. Very low. Any traffic passing through at this time of year tends to have a more concrete purpose but, the volume drops so significantly that many insurers and aggregators joke about packing up for Christmas every year. So not a bad time of year to test out a new site design. The best testbeds eliminate risks but allow you to try new things – like the Money Supermarket beta design for car insurance.

First impressions of this new design are “phew”. They needed it. They knew they needed it. But now they’re doing something about it. So thank god. And on the surface, the new interface and graphics are fairly easy on the eye. There’s a huge needless space at the top of the page but I’m sure there’s a stonking great big sponsorship deal that will ruin the whole thing and fill that space!

The product ategories are easy to differentiate – if limited for extensibility. The call to action hierarchy is correct for a comparison website. There’s the usual insurer brand back up strip which features on nearly all comparison websites now. And there’s an easy to understand/simple icon to endorse the product being compared. To be honest, there’s not much else on the page. And that’s not a jibe – that’s a very good thing. And surprisingly rare these days. It looks like they’ve used the “does it really need to be there rule” – for the beta site at least. Let’s hope an uneducated middle management type doesn’t get to throw their weight around and impose the need for junk to clutter up this tidy redesign.

And the redesign appears to be just as successful through the form filling. There are tons of ways to skin a cat. There are even more ways to design online forms. And there are elements of the form design which could be contended. But that’s exactly what beta sites, testing and analytics are for. Let the numbers do the talking. Having said that, the commonly held “Jakob Nielsen style” of thinking on form design (commonly ignored in the personal sector) has been implemented well. So it looks like the MSE designers have done their usability research on this one.

A criticism however. From a technical point of view. The document outline needs some attention guys. Multiple H1 tags on the page? The first being a non-javascript error message – not what the search engines are looking for. Having said that, the “Welcome to our site” headline copyrighting wouldn’t have been SEO endorsed so it’s possible the search team haven’t been let loose on this one just yet. The robots.txt exclusion “should” keep the search engine robots from the beta directory …for the time being at least.

So what are your thoughts? Does the public approve of the Money Supermarket beta re-design?