Fragrantica

a website critique




Home Page

For my website critique, I decided to look at the website I consistently get flagged for bot activity on: Fragrantica. I spend countless hours analyzing the notes of every fragrance I can think of (hence, being blocked from using the website due to my frequent searches). Fragrantica is an online forum for fragrance enthusiasts to interact with each other and learn about different scents and ingredients. It acts as a sort of “social media” catering to a very niche audience. Not only can you go and analyze the notes of any fragrance you may be interested in, but you can also see how other people have reviewed it and how it bodes among the masses.







Content

The website has many visual indicators of topics or notes or fragrances that make it easy to navigate and find what you are looking for. What it lacks in flashiness and eye-catching design, it makes up for in tons of content catered to whatever fragrance-related needs you may have. Whether you want to catch up on the latest fragrance releases, or check out reviews by fellow enthusiasts, or even find out what scents best relate to your zodiac sign in a fragrance horoscope, it’s all here.
As I’ll touch on next in terms of visual appeal, the site falls short of enticing imagery and design for viewers. It’s very cut-and-dry with its main focus being pushing out the content rather than making the content visually appealing. The site employs a long scroll of info for each scent and each story that creates an endless page that just has paragraphs of text on top of paragraphs of text. These paragraphs serve a use with some of them being about pros and cons people have created based on their wears or user reviews for each scent. These reviews have no ranking system besides all reviews to date, positive reviews, and negative reviews, making them tedious to comb through. It’s in moments like these where too much information and content actually becomes a negative.








Visual Appeal

Here is where Fragrantica falls short. The idea and the content are all 100% there, but visually, it is unappealing and unstimulating. Starting off with the home page, we’re greeted by blocks with low-opacity white backgrounds on top of a picture of a yellow flower; nothing too eye-catching there. From there, every element blends into the same kind of theme. The site employs limited use of color to highlight aroma families leaving the rest of the info to not stand out against the plain background. Each page follows the same layout, making it easy to navigate between different areas on the site, but again, this layout is not very appealing.
One thing Fragrantica does well, however, is making use of visual components for each scent. When looking at a specific fragrance, you’re met with a picture of the bottle, a color-coded scale ranking the strength of each note family, and a pyramid with images of each note like tuberose or sandalwood. This makes the content stand out because it’s visually educative, telling the user what to look for or what each note looks like. Without the addition of these images, I would have never known that vetiver used in scents is a dried, straw-like version of the plant. The site doesn't lose elements when switching from a laptop to a mobile version, but like I pointed out before, the hordes of information get compressed down to a tiny phone screen, making it a little more challenging to navigate.






Interactivity

Fragrantica is a pretty straightforward website with clear navigation for where you want to go on the site, but it is not without its faults. When trying to look up a fragrance, you have to type almost every word in its title with no errors in order to find it; rarely will the search option try to guess what you are looking for. When navigating this site, you do have to approach with patience as it can be a little frustrating at times. With no specific target in mind, the site can be daunting and even a little useless.
Even though it can be difficult to navigate sometimes, with a clear starting point, it becomes as easy to fall into a fragrance wormhole as you could on a site like Wikipedia; you can go in-depth into the different fragrances from a brand or a perfumer or find a multitude of new scents that match the profile of your current favorite. My critiques here fall under a similar umbrella as those I made in the visual appeal and content sections where the information is all there and more or less easy to find, but visually bleak. This leaves the user wanting more visual stimulation from the site to make it more fun to use.




Suggestions for Improvement

The biggest qualm I have with this site is its boring appearance. For a website covering a colorful and image-evoking topic, it lacks any style. This is not to say every scent should have its own personalized page with a style that best suits its overall aroma, but there should be more color present on the page. One way to do this is to take the color-coded aroma families already set and use those to visually differentiate the main notes in a scent; a fragrance with stronger vanilla notes would have a lighter page than a fragrance with stronger woody notes. Making a site visually stimulating is one way to draw traffic in and to keep those users coming back to see a visually appealing site.
Another suggestion I have would be to cut down on the content present on each page, especially the home page. The home page should not have every ounce of information that is on the site but rather the newest pieces of information like new stories or new releases. To encourage further exploration into the site, there could be a more refined side bar with interesting tidbits that would get a user to click in and introduce them to the mounds of content the site contains but in a more palatable way. Overall, while there are serious changes I feel this website needs, it’s still one of my favorite ways to kill time and learn about the different notes and how they all work together to create a final, beautiful product.