This week Richard Price has chosen Nest as High Position’s CRO Site of the Week, with their great use of imagery and simple design making for an eye-catching choice. As ever, winners of this prestigious award will be notified by HP’s Head of CRO, James Root via Twitter: @RootToMarket and be rewarded for their excellence with something from the CRO Drawer. Nominations can also be tweeted so please share and get involved!

What does the site do?

Takes seemingly everyday products and redesigns them with a focus on elegance and ease of use. Currently their range of products includes thermostats and smoke alarms, although it is their Learning Thermostat that takes centre stage

What does the site say they do?

“We’re Nest. We reinvent things. We take the unloved products in your home and make simple, beautiful, thoughtful things.”

“We take what’s familiar and look at it in a new light. Our team focuses on making technology that’s simple, fresh and helpful.”

“At the end of the day, look at our product and you’ll see a reflection of the people who made it.”

What does the site do well?

Attractive homepage that makes great use of imagery to engage the user
Makes sensible, limited use of a carousel to advertise their two most important products: their thermostat and the accompanying Nest app
Mousing over the “Store” icon opens a drop down menu with links to other online retailers selling Nest’s products. Useful if you have a preferred online retailer with whom you already have an account

Making a thermostat interesting is quite the challenge but Nest certainly succeed at making it engaging!

Plenty of useful information on the energy saving benefits of the product and how to install it. The most interesting however is a scrolling timeline detailing how the product will self-adjust and ‘learn’ how to adapt to your needs over the course of a year

From Day 1 installation all the way through to Day 365, when the energy efficiency really becomes apparent, the product timeline is a useful and engaging page

The actual product page couldn’t be any simpler really, making the buying of the product as easy as possible. All other extraneous information can be found elsewhere on the site

Simple right? The product, price and ability to add to your cart and checkout are all that are needed on this page.

Prominent Community and Support pages help foster a sense of inclusion with an exclusive, high end product and also assure users of the legitimacy and technical support they can expect
Well written, relevant blog content and a fantastic social presence. These guys have over 193,070 likes on Facebook and have tweeted over 9,000 times!

What does the site not do so well?

I feel that throughout the site the Calls to Action could be much stronger. This is particularly evident on the product information pages where the small CTA can get lost amid all of the information - TEST IT!

The review page feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. Given how attractive and engaging the rest of the site is, this page feels rather bland by comparison - TEST IT!

Review pages are a great way to inspire confidence in your product but in this instance this content could be much more persuasive

Despite their strong social presence, their social links are very hard to find. This is surprising given the focus on the ‘Nest Community’ and the strong online following Nest has cultivated over several years. Making these links more prominent will only help to grow this community - TEST IT!

Congratulations Nest! You’ve made Thermostats about as exciting and engaging as they’ve ever been and your website is a real pleasure to use! With some CRO Testing I think you could make things even more user friendly.