As a part of our social media strategy development (i.e. we literally need to write down some content here in Blog, right?), we take someone’s website or mobile app and figure out, how this could be improved in terms of usability and design.

This time the Always.com website appeared to be in the spotlight, so let’s carefully review it and figure out if something could be improved or not.

Existing website review

The website itself looks a bit outdated. The layout has a fixed 940px width, which is a pretty old school size already in 2021, as it will look really small at the large displays. The text information this way looks quite condensed and readability certainly could be improved.

Now what is bad:

The blue gradient, shadows and design elements, such as buttons, arrows, navigation, outlines, input fields – all is looking pretty old-school, though this may be a long tail of brand identity and design consistency from the brand itself.

Header: is quite small one (no wonder, with a such fixed width design layout!), the font size for the menu is smaller than the breadcrumbs, which is definitely not logical.

What can be improved:

Ok so the general idea of this article is not only to demonstrate how those well known brands are not doing the best in terms of their website presence, but we wanted to show what really could be improved in terms of UI/UX and we are showing the design sketches prepared by our designer for that.

General recommendations:

1. Work with free space – add some of the air into the layout
2. Redo the menu structure. “Period Calculator” could be done as a separate button (as a one of the CTA elements at the design), while Reward & Offers could be moved into the separate block inside the page layout itself.
3. The search form should be highlighted more in the top menu, because of the massive amount of data presented at the website, this could be easily lost.
4. Integrate more light photos, less busy visually
5. Footer could be done more compact and better structured and balanced. Currently the left part of it is overloaded with the information, while right part looks like empty.

Also, how about better texts positioning and general layout for the header slide show? Just follow the same idea about adding more air into the design.

Now if talking about the mobile (adaptive) view for the home page, there’s a lot of space for improvements too: