Naim have used videos on the website before this one - in my view, it’s not the best way to begin.
This latest one has a few Positives
Plenty of colour to liven up the sales of Black Boxes, intriguing images to grab attention, the Bentley link, a top of the range Statement, an Atom (?) with similar DNA, high quality design, all quite aspirational.
Negatives
The video auto plays when entering the website - which feels like you are being played an advert whether you want it or not + then there is the need / desire to locate the pause button to stop it.
The video flashes the imagery at a rapid pace, the editing is too quick.
Having moving people is fine, but they aren’t interacting with the products at all, they are in literally in two different universes. No one touches a remote or turns a volume dial, and even without sound on the website - no one is obviously reacting to music from a naim system.
There aren’t any New Classic products in this video!!!
To me the images are thoroughly unpleasant to look at, even before they start moving. Then the movement, when it happens (and it sometimes doesn’t) is jerky and not nice. Some of this, I admit, may be just personal taste, but there you go. I don’t like it!
On a practical note, for me the factual intormation is what’s most lacking here, and what I would mostly want from the website, making this iteration of greatly reduced value.
The lack of a rear view image to help with understanding connections is a glaring omission in this respect.
The removal of the button that takes you to the Support thing is another. There were poor substitutes for a proper manual, rarely updated or corrected, as discussed here in the past, but they were better than nothing. Perhaps they are still there somewhere, but I haven’t found them, and a link from the main product page would surely be the best way to make them available.
To be fair it’s probably difficult to resist temptation given the number of factual errors reported so far.
Exposed HTML tags, really?
My constructive criticism having experience in intranet and internet websites for a FTSE100 company is to take it down and fix it properly to avoid futher embarrassment.
Naim control website content so flashy videos causing possible epilepsy or seizures can be avoided, difficult to control what we (the enthusiastic masses) add to threads via our posts, so easy to say no to GIF’s than having to correct/remove in retrospect.
And whereas there is a button to pause, it remains problematic due to the subtle nature of the button, the subtle focus style and the location. The subtle contrast of the button and the focus won’t pass the WCAG contrast requirements either. Plus users still have to endure the animation in order to find the button, especially on small screens where the animation is present but the button is off-screen.
I was thinking that a search function could be useful, but I couldn’t find it until I eventually caught a glimpse of it at the bottom of the Products page. Unfortunately it’s unusable on my iPhone because it’s hidden under the Apple control bar (as are some other buttons) and you can only see it if you swipe upwards. Then you can’t use it because you have to let go of the screen to type, and that makes it pop back down under the control bar again!
The source code looks autogenerated (i.e. not intended to be read). Looks like Laravel Livewire, a tool that runs in PHP on the server and builds the pages dynamically.
Doesnt mean anything really but explains why the site UI feels a bit “off”, at least to me using Safari. There is also a file missing “Matomo.js” but it’s only a tracking lib (see what the users are doing).
The site was easier to browse on an iPhone but when you click your way through the site it is extremely irritating when the “change language” view and the title bar shows up and use 30% of the screen on every link you click. There is also a lot of pretty bad formatting but mostly it didnt hurt readability so it’s not a big problem.
Personally I like fast “native” coded websites with traditional navigation better (I like when I can navigate the site with the knowledge I learnt on other sites).
I used to be the Quality Manager for the English arm of a very large German electrical engineering company.
There were similar set-ups around the world within the company.
Although the main marketing was in Germany, each country had their marketing department to be able to represent the subtle differences for each country.
More importantly, each country had its own translation department to get the language, nuances, etc, correct for each country. One of the main requirements is using a translator translating into their Mother tongue.
Translating into English by a German, French, or whatever national never works successfully.
Naim will sort their website out eventually, hopefully sooner, rather than later.
