The guys at LOVEFiLM have finally caught up with the rest of the web and updated their homepage and done a little clean up of the navigation.

For those who can’t remember, or haven’t see it before the homepage was in two variants, one for when you are not signed in (Visitors) and a completely different page when you do sign in. The Visitors page was more of a advertisement page, where you don’t get to see any of the goodies inside the website till you sign up.. shame on you LOVEFiLM.

Old LOVEFiLM Visitor page - click to viewNew LOVEFiLM Visitor page - click to view

Now after a while the powers that be inside LOVEFiLM towers have decided to show what is inside the site for all to see, this is great exposure as DVD rentals are only the tip of the iceberg (the interviews, competitions, trailers and reviews were always too far down the navigation for me).

So lets look at the new design.

As you can see from the small screen shots above (click to view the larger versions) you get more information on the page, the old visitor site was aiming to get people to sign up (or in) by only hinting at what is inside. The new version shows a whole lot more. The navigation has changed, there is more information on what you are paying for, a new content viewer and a tabbed area for movie selections. Further down the page are quizzes and user collections (more on those in another post) .

The left navigation which wasn’t on the old page has been brought in, so at a glance you can see all of the areas of the site to explore, and the header of the page is brighter with a new slogan. The old slogan was “The best way to rent DVDs”, which put the site into just one category (even though they rent games and digital downloads). Where as the new slogan “Find the films you want to watch” is more of a mouth full, but opens up the idea of this being a film site, rather than just a DVD rental store. This still takes shows that LOVEFiLM are firmly promoting Movies, and seems to shy away from Games, which is a shame as the game industry has been larger than the film industry for a number of years now.

Overall i like the new design, as i can get to what i want quickly from one page, before i used to have to remember my way around a maze of what is called ‘a navigation system’.. although that maze is still their, hopefully it is next to get redone.

As this is not just a re-design of existing content, but a complete reshuffle of the internal content i will write up a post about each of the new sections that make up this page, at first glance they seem to do the trick, but i can also see some users not understanding what they should do with the page. Hopefully my next posts will give you an insight into what it can and cant do, and it will probably be easier to critique them in there own right and have this post as an overall view.

please post your own thoughts on the new LOVEFiLM design, i am not a professional and these are my own thoughts, yours will probably vary and i would love to hear them.

To view the new and old pages side by side you can see them on my Flickr set ‘ LOVEFiLM - New Design Screenshots’ or click on the thumbnails below.
View LOVEFiLM’s full size old page on my Flickr pageView LOVEFiLM’s full size new page on my Flickr page

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