Ralph Lauren Mobile – live but needs a lot of work!

As noted earlier this week, Ralph Lauren has started to launch a mobile marketing campaign and site.

Ralph Lauren Mobile - RL-QR

Unfortunately my experience with the site is still not good. In theory, RL wants to push a mobile lifestyle site with content and shopping. In experience, this you get:

RL Mobile

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I have a similar screenshot for the Quicktime file as well. Neither will also play on the iPhone (I only expected the Quicktime to work but tested both). As you can see the site is also poorly optimized for various screens:

The best looking of the bunch is the Intro / About page:

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The main navigation could be much better if the images expanded based on browser detection:

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photo(3)

There are also way too many clicks to do most things with reliance on the back button or a click on the home link which forces you to re-load the main page rather than presenting a simplified navigation in the footer to let someone just get to another section of the site with minimal fuss. To begin shopping I had to select RL Classics, then the RL Classics Shop, then choose a selection of options from either Men or Women (which could have easily been a level higher). Once I choose Polos I was presented with this:

photo(5)

I thought the iPhone would be an easy fit for RL Mobile as they are both essentially luxury goods, but the sheer lack of attention to details like auto-fitting the page makes browsing and shopping quite tedious. I honestly just expected the iPhone to work well given all the attention and likely overlap with the RL target audience …

I did like that (as you would also expect) you can choose colors appropriately for shirts and then was pleasantly surprised to see the photo change and the model wearing the color shirt I’d just selected. The close-up pictures of the color swatches make it easy to see what you’re getting as well. Why do I have to keep zooming each page though to make this work! every click and subsequent page load requires this adjustment!!

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The only section of the site which is optimized is the shopping cart, though that is handled by Usablenet directly. I’m not sure why the rest of site can’t be as optimized in the same way as these pages and unfortunately I can’t see too many people making it this far.

photo(6)

08/14/2008

I can’t imagine too many people wanting to spend time here with the experience I’ve just had. Sorry, but that’s my honest opinion. It’s not fun or informative. The multimedia features are seem like they are broken, yet work fine on the desktop side and there are far too many page loads with too little payoff.

Unfortunately with mobile, you need strong content and design to maintain someone’s attention in such a small space.I’d like to see this succeed actually as mobile should really be a strong consideration for a brand. The RL Mobile experience seems like it has good intentions but a very poor execution.

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4 Replies to “Ralph Lauren Mobile – live but needs a lot of work!”

  1. I did not … have a link? I actually thought you might be kidding at first, but assume they would promote it in their own mag.

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