A website review by Danny Wirken

Car Rental Express lets users compare different independent car rental companies, boasting of a patented consumer reliability index and rate search tools.

The site sells a good premise (hundreds of small, independent companies at your fingertips) but the structure makes navigating that information difficult and sometimes frustrating.

The opening page just has too much information. You simply don’t know where to look first, and they use about 4 or 5 different fonts in different colors. Font selection is strategic. You use it to build hierarchy, training the viewer’s eyes to identify a hierarchy of information: look at this first, then that text next, etc. Varying it “just so it looks pretty” is bad graphic design.

Aside from the use of too many fonts, there’s the problem of the size of the fonts: they’re just too small. Again, this is due to the desire to put as much information into one page as possible—which doesn’t work, and has proven to be an eyesore. Nobody likes reading text with a font size of 8, especially when you’re doing something like comparing car rentals. You want the facts easy to read, easy to compare, and hopefully the whole experience shouldn’t have you squinting at the screen and giving up because of a headache. Remember that the whole point of graphic design is to make the reading experience easier. Web readers have a low frustration level: if they’re having a hard time, they’ll leave.

What the website should’ve done was to stop cramming everything into one page. Online marketing tools are unique in the sense that you can tuck information and reveal it when the reader’s good and ready. Unfortunately, in one fell swoop, the website forces you to digest promos, the rate system, five or six taglines, a registration field, links to articles. It’s very overwhelming, and the result is that it doesn’t look professional, nor does it really promote the company.

The moral of the story: you don’t have to bludgeon the reader into believing that you’re good. Sometimes you have to pace the flow of information so that your communication messages are heard properly. The design would’ve been more effective if they had isolated the company’s key strength, made an introductory page, included links to an explanation of the rating system, and then a “make a reservation now!” button.

There’s also a tendency to get lost in the middle of using the site. A first-time user may also find it hard to figure out where to go, and what to do. You end up having to keep backtracking to check if you’ve missed an important step, or to verify information that you need for your purchase decision. Again, there should be a short introductory page explaining the process, rather than a clutter of links and charts that you’ll have to wade through before you get to their consumer reviews and rate search tools, and there should be cross links within the pages so you can re-access whatever you may need.

On a high note, the registration process is straightforward and easy to use. Once you’ve completed the fields (with location, date of rental, driving area) you’re given a set of agencies. Click on one, and you’ll have a short profile of the agency, plus their requirements and policies. The processing takes seconds, with no lag time—even when tried on a really slow computer.

Unfortunately, the rating system isn’t that convenient. For example, the consumer reliability index is on a separate page, so you’ll have to do some manual cross-indexing. Logically, you’d like to hear about other customer’s experiences with a company the moment you see it generated on your list, so you can make a quick decision whether or not you want to make a call. The least the site should’ve done was to insert a quick link (accessed, perhaps, by clicking on the name of the car agency) allow the visitors to access the reviews.

Curiously, most of the attempted searches for a vehicle (even as late as four months down the year) led to a message that they could not locate one but would accept a “no obligation inquiry”. So the system may not be as comprehensive as suggested—and in any case, they should explain what “no obligation” means on the page.

Plus, reliability is measured by a five-star system, although it’s unclear how the ratings are arrived at (again, the information isn’t available unless you actively look for it) and the “details” link that should supposedly explain everything doesn’t always work. It would also have been more fair if the readers comments (a few key quotes) were included, to give a general idea of why that score was given.

Not that it’s all the web designer’s fault. There’s a need to streamline the content. The site tends to give too much unnecessary information. For example, they’ll give an overview of the state you want to visit—yeah, tourists love this trivia, but they’ll get it anyway from their travel guides. Rather than clutter up the viewer’s head with all this marginal data, they would’ve been more useful if they had included articles like “How to Select a Car Rental Agency” or “What to Look for in a Car”. Leave things like most important tourist spots or typical climate to the tourist sites, which can talk about it more in depth and at a time when the visitor is in the mood to leisurely browse.

In summary, the website is a lesson in the importance of site organization. Yes, they have good consumer review systems. Yes, they offer useful selection tools. But if you can’t find out, or don’t know how to use it, or simply have to go through too many steps to apply it in your particular search, then it’s not worth the viewers’ trouble. The web designers should’ve realized that if they spent that much time developing their customer review software, they may as well have put a little more thought into the way it’s presented to web visitors