In this blog post, I want to look into the user experience (UX) on different platforms for the Carl's Jr. website. UX is important and all companies need to pay attention to it. Each website should have its own personality and tone to it. People don't want boring webpages, they want interactive ones. They also like pages that are easy to use, especially for restaurants, because they usually want to find a menu or a store location quickly. It's critical to give customers a good experience on different platforms (computers, tablets, and smartphones). Each platform should have a different version.
Carl's Jr. Website on Desktops and Laptops
This is the Carl's Jr. website on a computer. I think their website is pretty straight forward. In the top bar the customer can easily find the menu, contact information, and store location. These are the first things that a customer is usually looking for. Promotions are really easy to find and they're easy to use. For example, if there's a promotion with a coupon, it links directly to a coupon you can print.
There was one thing that was confusing for me. The social media links should be at the top so they can be easily found. I couldn't find them at first, but then I saw they were on a separate bar on the bottom right. This is not a good place for social media buttons and they're also too small for a page that's so busy.
Carl's Jr. Website on Tablets and Smartphones
The UX of the website on a tablet is the same as on a desktop computer because they didn't make a version specifically for a tablet. Moving around with touch is much nicer than using a mouse and the webpage makes this easy. The only problem is that some of the boxes and the links to social media are too small for touch. They could increase the size of these boxes to make them work better on tablets and having larger social media buttons is better for the desktop version too. They did make these changes on the smartphone version of the website which is very different from the desktop version. The social media buttons are large and easy to touch.
I think they only did this for the touch interface and not to make the buttons more visible. It seems that they didn't think about the tablet platform at all or else they would have made the buttons larger everywhere.
The buttons for menu and locations are also bigger on the smartphone version and they're easy to find and use.
The bad part about the mobile site is that most of the links bring you to the desktop version of the website.
Carl's Jr. Website Personality
I think the Carl's Jr. website on a desktop computer doesn't have any personality unique to Carl's Jr. It's just a simple white page without any effort to make the design nice and interesting. It doesn't have any specific feeling to it and it could be the website of any hamburger fast food restaurant. It also isn't very interactive and the customer doesn't feel like it's communicating with them. Even their logo is so small that it doesn't seem like you're on their main website. The customer can't hear the voice of Carl's Jr. with this design.
But the smartphone version is better. I think it has more personality to it. The logo is very big and right at the top. They also changed the color of some of the buttons to red which matches with the color of the logo. The pictures of their products also take up more of the screen and the photos keep changing unlike on the desktop version where it just stops. Something that was cool was when you click a link it shows a loading icon with a rotating Carl Jr's star.
Carl's Jr. Be Unique!
Carl's Jr. can make their UX better by creating a design that feels like Carls Jr. When you look at the website of Shake Shack, the feeling is exactly Shake Shack. But also, they should communicate with the customer better. The website should be more fun like the fun and crazy image that Carl's Jr. has in their commercials. It's sexy and ridiculous at the same time and this is the image that Carl's Jr. has used for many years but it's totally missing on website.
They should also have a full smartphone version of the website that includes all the different links and they should make sure their desktop version works better with tablets or else design a version just for tablets.
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