The Homepage

The two websites I will be reviewing in this blog will be the sites of automobile manufacturers Honda and Toyota. When viewing the homepage it becomes immediately apparent that the thumbnails of the various cars will provide the link to information about each on both of the websites.One thing I did find was the tabs section on the Honda site seemed much more user friendly. It was very straightforward in that you could find the car you were interested in and under that tab were all of the various trim levels of the car. This made it nice, as you were able to view all the vehicles in a row. The Toyota site had tabs for cars, trucks, then hybrids, and especially within the trucks tab they showed probably more different options than they really needed too. That being said Toyota does offer more cars, I just feel Honda was able to utilize the hovering tags in a much more user-friendly manner. As far as the big banner that both of the sites share, there’s really no comparison. Honda does a horrible job of utilizing the space as they just have one image of the Accord, a car that everyone is familiar with. Toyota, on the other hand, uses the space to advertise more of a variety of their cars as well as some newer technology. Honda could really learn a thing or two from Toyota in that respect. It seems overall, Honda did a lot better with their links and making them easy to get to. Even the social networking links are right there and easy to find. However, I’m in no way saying Toyotas links become unusable, just that they may require a little more effort than that of Hondas.

The Car Pages

When you get to the page with all the information on a specific car is where the sites start to differ a good bit. Honda provides a video on most of their cars, albeit not the greatest video ever, it still gives you and idea of what the car looks like at all angles in motion. Toyota provides videos on a few of their cars but for the most part it seemed they just provided a decent sized photo, which isn’t necessarily bad. What I did notice with Toyota, however, especially within the links to the trucks, they seemed to double up on things making the user jump through unnecessary hoops to get to the information. As stated before, the truck section is divided up into the various trims and versions of the particular truck. They seem to double up making you select the trim of the truck again. Perhaps this is a way to get you to reconsider the version you are looking at but I feel they could do a better job of making it less of a hassle. From there we move on to how the information is found. Toyota takes you to a specs sheet which with tabs at the top whereas Honda shows a few of the more interesting features of the car on the front page then provides a sidebar that is nicely broken up into sections. I find Hondas approach more visually attractive as well as better for finding the information I want to know. Toyotas approach is nice in that it gets down into the features, which would be fine on a brochure, but I feel taking advantage of breaking the information up into various links makes the overall usability much better.

Technical Execution

Now with all the simple comparisons being made I would like to talk about how well executed the sites are. I think both achieve a successful level of hierarchy. I will say Toyotas site seems to do a better job because the designer didn’t seem to be afraid of really bumping up the font size to grab the viewers attention. Hondas type seemed to be a little more neutral most of the way through, however, they did use the contrast of bolds to regular size as well as color changes so they were in no way unsuccessful. When it comes to the overall readability of the text, both use very legible typefaces and size seems decent. Older viewers may need to increase the type size but neither of the sites seem unfriendly to type size changes. As far as line length is concerned, I noticed in both sites the line length towards the bottom car get tedious to read, but it is generally not information that the reader absolutely has to see. When reading the important content I felt very comfortable reading so I would say both did a very good job. On the note of color palettes, both use a flat grey most of the way through. Honda does jump ahead in this comparison by changing background colors and textures on a few of the cars, as well as doing a nice job with coloring the sidebar links. Both seem to do a good job with the imagery and contrast they achieve with it. When it comes to the grid structure, Toyota had the only site I seemed to be able to make out any sort of  grid. They had a four column grid system that was working quite nice. Honda had columns, but nothing seemed uniform. At the same time, I don’t believe the lack of uniformity in the column size really threw the site off.