Living in Southern California I am exposed to more surf and skate clothing than you could imagine.  As I took a short walk today to the beach I found my inspiration for my next analysis.  Some fellow walked by as I was “checking in” to La Jolla shores beach and he was wearing Hurley board shorts,  a Hurley t-shirt and and a Hurley hat.  Overkill? Quite possibly but it prompted me to take out my phone and Google “Hurley” to check out their mobile  (unfriendly) website.

Not Surfable!

Before I start let me say that I am a bit biased because I believe websites should balance the functional and the fancy, not just be billboards for your brand. I hate splash pages that serve no purpose but to have you click to enter the site.  Hurley’s site makes you do that very thing. You have to click or touch the image to enter the website. Absent is any intuitiveness. You are greeted with Hurley’s big “H Jeans” logo and a surfer…..uh, jeans and surfing? That doesn’t make much sense. Anyway, what am I supposed to do now? Where do I go? What do I click? Does something happen here? The mobile version (at least on my iPhone) doesn’t offer any indication of what to do. The full site is just as confusing. My suggestion would be to make it clear and easy for people to perform an action, something I preach over and over again. If you must separate your site into “store” and “site”, then make it distinguisable – keep the text visible that reads “store” and ‘site”. Don’t make people think too much…we are lazy and want our surfing (pun intended) to be simple.

After making to the ”site” section, the first thing I see are a bunch of videos that don’t play.  This is a major problem regardless if its just an iPhone issue.  The focal point of your site is to demonstrate, through video and flash, how your clothing fits into this action sport lifestyle and mobile visitors can’t even view them. A simple fix would be to convert all videos to a format that is compatible on iPhones, Droids and all other popular smartphones. You might not think many people are accessing your mobile site to learn about your brand but read this – according to a Pew Research Study, 40% of adults use the mobile phones to access web. This number is up from 32% last year and is probably much higher for the younger, more “Hurley” ish crowd. You might not think it is a big deal now but you watch – in 3 years time the mobile web usage will be bigger than desktop usage.

Despite the awkward entrance, the site isn’t a horrible user experience on a smartphone. It isn’t all in flash so I am able to navigate relatively easily but it could be much easier. A company like Hurley (owned by Nike), should invest in developing a mobile experience. Many brands do it well – Zappos and Amazon to name a couple. A simple sniffer script placed on the home page can dictate what type of browser or device the visitor is using and can serve the appropriate version of the site – “mobile”  for mobile users and “full” for desktop users.  Perhaps just start with making the videos compatible on the “site” version and then move on to a simple shopping experience on the “store” version.  Whatever route you choose, step back and ask yourself, what is the most important information we want to share with our users and what do they want to get out of this experience? It might not be as complicated as you think.