Relaunch & rebrand of car hire site

Rollo Tamasi

Hey guys,
Would love to get some feedback on the recently relaunched and rebranded Nova Car Hire site.

It's a complete overhaul of the previous site from a design and brand point of view. I have attached a screenshot of the previous design for comparison.

We introduced a mascot to the site for branding purposes and for the "memorability" factor, we have simplified the search and booking process to make it easier for people to book car hire, and we restructured a lot of our internal linking.

One of the things we really wanted to get across too was consumer confidence in picking Nova for car hire. So, we put our phone number front and center, highlighted customer reviews, and surfaced a lot of our unique selling points throughout the site.

We have built out informative and rich landing pages and the site is responsive to gracefully scale for tablet and mobile browsers.

I would really appreciate hearing your honest feedback on the overall design, and maybe also get recommendations for what the site is lacking.

Cheers.

Cormac (Head of Digital at Visitravel - part of Nova Car Hire).

redman85

Excellent design and a big improvement from the old design.

I'm nitpicking but one thing that kinda bugged me was when looking for a quote it didn't ask for car model ie. SUV or Luxury. I know you have a filter on the next page but it would make it simpler if you could specify model or leave it as any when looking for a quote. It's just a small thing and I'm sure most people don't care.

Nice work on the site. Hope it's a success

tricky D

Apols for the negative review but, I honestly preferred the old site.


The colour scheme was much more impactful and vibrant. The new one looks dour and dull in comparison and the brown reminds me of what we often call 'sh1t brown' which is to be avoided.

The old site had guide prices displayed prominently. Users will be more willing to fill out a quote request if they have an idea of the price up front.

Not sold on the mascot, it reminds me of that annoying dog in MS Office who gets on the way too often.

The logo is also a backward step imho. You've removed the motif and the web URL and divorced the strapline even further.

These types of wholesale brand redesigns don't sit well with me at all. Evolving an identity is fine but starting with a blank sheet too often suggests something is wrong.

Squeeonline

I never saw the old site, but I'll reiterate the previous posters' comments.

I dont like the brown/pink colours. The background needs serious re-thinking. The brown stripe is awful IMO. Brown is too stark a contrast with the very white elements of the site. Consider a textured white background to break it up a bit. Test out what it would look with a nice shade of green. I would lighten the pink too, it's too neon.

Not a fan of the dog, but yeah, he'll be memorable.

I love the idea of the site though. I've been looking for something like this for a while, especially where I can see rough prices without having to put in a ton of data. It's very easy to use, though I would agree wholeheartedly with being able to select vehicle class on the front page, but make it an optional thing. The default should be "show all" or similar. Also allow people to select more than one class.

Rollo Tamasi

Hey guys. Thanks for the feedback.

@redman85 - that's certainly one of the things on our test list of things to try out and see what happens.

@tricky D - I'm a bit surprised that you prefer the older site but I can understand your rationale once you went into detail. Prices are certainly something we want to surface on the homepage and throughout the rest of the main landing pages.

@Squeeonline - yup, there is a bit of "marmite" in there alright. Things you will love, things... not so much, but fingers crossed our site stands out from all the other primary blue competitor sites. That's the idea anyway

JD RoX

You honestly couldn't pick any ****tier color...Literally!
I like the simplicity of functions, everything is easy to see, but in the same time, it's not easy on the eye. Change the color, please! Or at least that brown line you call background-art.

Also, fix validation errors, you have plenty of them