Mercedes-Benz USA Launches Website Redesign
Yesterday MBUSA.com launched their website redesign. The new site is a major face lift from the old version, which was beginning to look outdated in comparison to many of its competitors. Every single element of the site has been upgraded and built completely in Flash, improving the overall user experience throughout.
I worked on the initial stages of this redesign at Critical Mass over two years ago. My involvement at the time was building a working prototype of the site in Flash. Only a few vehicles could be selectable back then, but overall the site’s design has not changed too much. The Mercedes-Benz’ development team has done a great job of finishing it off.
Congratulations to everyone involved in creating this site.
Wow.. At last.. Finally!
Granted a few things right off the bat would make me quickly argue your statement of “improvement of the user experience”.
A few points:
You can see the flash container is massive.. So instead of having a traditional chrome that scrolls, you have a flash scroller (which funny enough doesn’t work with my mouse). Boo.
Secondly, I see nice URLS, but going backwards via the backbutton was all over the map.. Which is unacceptable since the back button is the #1 button pushed by users on any website.
Overall, I don’t understand why it took over 2 years to build this (I remember seeing your demos back then). As well I don’t feel like the site is that big of an improvement! If they would have implemented faster it would have been more impressive..
My 2 cents..
David