An automotive site experience should function in a straightforward and user-friendly manner that promotes substance over style. iPerceptions offers some tips to help keep your site lean and mean.

More than any other industry vertical, the automotive sector has embraced wholesale the phenomenon of rich content delivery. Although the use of Adobe Flash on brand landing pages ranges from the sparse to the excessive, you would be hard pressed to find a carmaker that is not leveraging this powerful fusion of sight and sound in some capacity.

Some clever manufacturers are employing this technology to push the stylistic envelope in new directions. For instance, one major North American manufacturer, on whose site our survey is deployed, has integrated small iTunes-esque widgets into some of their model pages, offering their visitors a choice of music styles to enjoy while they peruse the site. The chosen ambience transports the visitor into a vehicle launch at a trendy nightclub, and conveys images of well-dressed patrons sipping expensive drinks and DJs spinning a heady cocktail of sounds.  

This new mode of automotive web design has presumably tested well in focus groups; it certainly passes the eyeball test. As aesthetically pleasing as these pages appear, however, we still need to ask this critical question: does this type of website experience and this form of content delivery resonate with actual visitors? 

Taking a look at our Automotive Industry Customer Satisfaction Report for Q1 2007, we discover mixed opinions. While the industry-wide score for relevancy, which speaks to the pertinence of onsite information and is certainly informed by rich content and multimedia, was an area of strength, the industry score for depth indexed lower, suggesting a reaction to the fact that content detail often took a back seat to visual presentation. It is also noteworthy that convenience, which speaks to whether the site saves a visitor time, was an area of relative weakness across brands.

Source: iPerceptions' Automotive Industry Customer Satisfaction Report, Q1 2007

Is a flashy site worth the wait?
Although graphically intensive Flash content is certainly not entirely to blame for this, an analysis of open-ended commentary for several brands reveals that it does play a critical part in slowing down the online experience. Indeed, the last thing visitors want to be greeted with on entry to the domain is an endless sequence of progress bars, informing them in rather tedious fashion how much longer they have to wait for 100% of the content to load. A well-delivered website experience should function similarly to a well-run stage play: transitions should be smooth and seamless, and that the visitor’s attention should never stray to the back end: the technical nuts and bolts of actually rendering the content on screen. 

Does video work against your goals?
In a related manner, videos, particularly ones that show a car in a dramatic light, can be a tremendously potent and immersive way to communicate the essence of a vehicle. And there is anecdotal evidence that suggests that videos can heighten purchase likelihood as a next step behavior. According to most visitors we’ve surveyed, however, videos are better suited for deployment on model pages or mini-sites, rather than on the main page. The reasoning is simple: the video should be targeted at the enthusiast, the visitor who truly wants to delve deeper into the soul of the car. The main page should be an unobtrusive and visitor-friendly virtual lobby, where rich content can be present in no more than a subdued manner.

Are users getting beaten by their bandwidth?
There is also another factor in play. Although the propagation of streaming video and audio has transformed the internet from a dry desert of text-based pages into a whimsical multimedia carousel, we need to remember that bandwidth is not unlimited. Many ISPs can and will impose downloading and uploading caps, and certain ones have taken to restricting bandwidth in an effort to ease the strain placed on their networks by the explosion of P2P media sharing. While this won’t be a mitigating factor for all visitors, it certainly raises the specter of systemic slowdown at the user end, particularly among those segments operating on a “lite” DSL or cable connection. 

Conclusion
There is a definite consensus among automotive website visitors that a site whose design is straightforward and user-friendly is superior to one that is overburdened with media, and thus the former is more conducive to purpose of visit accomplishment. Since visit accomplishment underpins site satisfaction -- which in turn is a key component of any brand-building platform -- there is a pertinent learning here for automotive decision makers. Follow the advice of a wise user, whose commentary I came across recently: "Guys, it's not a movie, it's a website." So, unless a lucrative award for creativity or virtuosity is on the line, do not be afraid to let style and pizzazz take a back seat to utility, and watch your visitor satisfaction grow.

Duff Anderson is VP of R&D at iPerceptions. Read full bio.