Follow-up on the new Pronto

In July, I wrote about the revamping of Pronto. Since then, the shopping engine has improved its new version: from a branding / marketing / product perspective, I find this is one of the most appealing CSEs available today. Here are some quick notes about the changes I have spotted.

New home page

• To introduce the new brands (ProntoStyle, ProntoTech, ProntoHome) and feature, for each one, some popular queries (leading to faceted navigation result pages).
• With new marketing messages (showing a focus on “top brands”, “top stores”)
• An emphasis on personal alerts by e-mail (“no time to shop? No Worries!”)
• A de-emphasis of “MyPronto” personalization pages, only reachable with a very small link at the bottom of the page.

Simple yet efficient homepage. Nice execution.

Faceted navigation

• New preeminent Store filter, aligned with the new marketing message seen on Homepage: “We search all the top stores”. However, not sure it is the most important filter for users. I suppose Pronto may sell this placement to stores…
• Updated offer display with a new roll-over mechanism. When rolling over an offer, a slightly bigger image is displayed over the offer (an effect similar to Bing Image Search); unfortunately, this has the effect of hiding the title or price info… A “see details” button lets the user switch to a detailed view, offering offer details + links to bookmarking engines (Delicious, Twitter, Facebook…); when seeing the “see details” panel, we don’t see the image of the offer anymore, which I find annoying…