A Review of Fool.co.uk

Fool.co.uk, the UK division of The Motley Fool, has paid us for a review of their Mortgage Centre.

On first glance, I’m a more than a little overwhelmed. There is a lot of information in this section, and it’s just one of at least seven different sections on the site. Additionally, with all the red my eyes don’t know where to look. What’s most important? Are all the red sections essentially the same content? That’s what I assume since they all share a common look.

As it turns out, though, they aren’t. There are actually four unique sections to this page: the Product of the Week, an ad for their Mortgage Service, the Free Mortgage Guide, and a list of mortgage rates for providers in the UK. These sections definitely need something to distinguish them so that the customer doesn’t have to work so hard to delineate what is what.

Because the top three sections look too much like ads, I’m skipping right to the list of mortgage rates. I like the way the list has all the information I need, but I’m stunned that I can’t sort by each of the different columns. This isn’t really an issue with only five listings right now, but there’s no way I would come back to this page if they had ten or more listings and no way to sort. There are much more user-friendly mortgage information sites that I would pick over this one.

Back up to the ads — or, rather, the top three sections. My first confusion is that they don’t share any sort of common structure. I can click on some elements in one box that I can’t click on in the next. One section has more information available, while the other two don’t. I don’t understand anything more about their purpose than I did on first glance.

Finally, the small font throughout makes things a real chore to sort through.

This looks like a good first shot by the folks at Fool.co.uk, and there obviously was quite a bit of work put into it, but I wouldn’t recommend this particular section to anyone based on how it stands right now. I’m sure that’s why they’re wanting these reviews, though.