Sergei Gets Botox: Compare The Market Redesigned

Everybody's favourite meerkat has emerged from the operating theatre fronting a fully-loaded facelift. No, Car Throttle hasn't turned into E! News for Animals, but instead today we're looking at Compare The Market's loaded redesign aimed at engaging more users and trying to make your car insurance comparison online search that little bit more intuitive. Oh, and if that means less traffic for seasoned competitors, well that's a plus!

Disclosure: Compare The Market paid us to trawl through their latest redesign and take a look at the new product from a young, fresh set of eyes to see whether this is going to help us lads and ladettes searching for cheap insurance deals. What follows is an unbiased, objective look at the website. And if you have your own opinions and feedback, CTM want to hear from you in the comments!

Let's start with the home page. The first thing that's striking and especially appealing for a young automotive enthusiast is the rad colour scheme. Blue on blue on green. Whilst my previous sentence could be mistaken for a Wiz Khalifa track title, it's pretty much bang on what you're going to see on hitting the root page, and I think it looks blazing.

The logo itself hasn't been reworked, and Sergei from Moscow (who by the way, is no less than 77 years old) still has prominent placement to the right hand side of the page, making sure new users react positively to our furry friend, whilst seasoned CTM fanboys have the same warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that they're shopping once again with a creature who's survived countless wars and illnesses.

A large "call-to-action" greets the user, although the term "Hi there" I feel could be a little more personalised. Using cookies to log users names as a greeting would surely be a winner, or maybe CTM could come up with witty, one-liners "Welcome dude" or "What's up Adnan" would appeal to me far more

. Personalisation is key. Anything that leaves me with a smile on my face is awesome for user engagement and will also mean I'll hit up CTM rather than using one of their colder, heartless competitors in the future.

Simplicity is evidently the name of the game with the redesign. From a more technical point of view, and this is something we also practice (are intending to practice) with CT, it's all about the funnel. Compare The Market wants less users to bounce off the homepage and wants users to click through to the individual pages - Motor Insurance and Home Insurance most likely being the most popular products they offer.

Let's test this redesign out!

The best way to test whether this redesign is an improvement over the last is for me (a 22-year-old male) to plug in some details about a potential car purchase and desired insurance quote. I'll be very honest here; for insurance comparison quotes, I always use Money Supermarket so I'm really hoping that this is an intuitive design that will get me to switch over.

Let's start at Auto Trader. Today I fancy buying a pristine 20,000-mile Renaultsport Clio 200 Cup. Why not. This particular example will hit my bank account to the tune of £9,495 but for that I'm getting quite a beast of a car to show off to my mates. Fantastic.

However, I'm going to need insurance to get this on the road. Let's plug the details into Compare The Market's new car insurance page:

All the information is laid out well and there are nice big, green buttons for users to click through to get to the next stages. Filling in your information is standard across all comparison sites and after all is said and done, we get to the final page:

After all is said and done, insurance on "my" Renaultsport Clio 200 Cup will run me up £1,780.67 via a company called Premium Choice. That's pretty steep but considering I have 0 years no claims, and I'm a young, red-blooded male, it's to be expected.

The verdict

Overall I'm pretty impressed with Compare The Market's new redesign. I felt that when filling in my user details, the darker blue background was a little distracting and sticking with light colours is easier on the eyes. However for young users, this is the type of funky insurance site that doesn't scream "corporate insurance" at you, and for that reason, I'm possibly going to make the switch over.

So, what do you think of the redesign?