OTTO is one of the biggest and more traditional retailers in Germany. In a country that makes beautiful cars and machines but could do better in the customer service area, this company is probably above the average providing a 24/7 call center, shops, mail and fax ordering systems, TV shopping and of course the internet site www.otto.de. It seems that OTTO is decided to sell products. I bought products at OTTO several times and can certainly not complain.
But recently they updated the site and I have to say that they are only partially winning my hard. The first problem I have found was to find the catalogue menu. It does not look like a menu, it actually does it like a decoration. You have to hover over the words and the menu will open, but this does not happen at the right speed, so I hovered over many times and nothing happened. This is an important flaw, we know the search feature is very important but I was looking for the menu and it took me a lot of time to find it.
One very good thing is the OTTO site version for visually impaired people, it has a very clean design and is easy to use (I would recommend it even more than the main site!). But also here I might notice some flaws, specially in the wording, link position and behaviour. The link to the site for the visually impaired is a little bit hidden inside a drop down menu and could be difficult for some people to reach it. Then, the link itself is called something like “shopping without boundaries” (Barrierefrei Shoppen, I wonder if the meaning of this is clear to everybody; although there is an entry for that on the German Wikipedia, I guess something like “For visually impaired” would make more sense).
Once you click on that menu item, instead of lunching the visually impaired site version, you are redirected to another page explaining the whole thing. There you find another link called “test it now”… does that mean that this is only a test or that I can actually buy stuff there?
I like OTTO because they have a huge catalogue and in general they have a good service, but their site could be a little bit better.
