There are some things in this world you have no choice to live with, for us Quebec citizens, the SAQ is one of them. You see, in Quebec selling alcohol is illegal, only our government can do that. As you can guess, since they are the only one selling imported wines and hard liquors, they have all the market, meaning they don’t necessary have to care, you will buy their products either way, guaranteed.
Just to put you in context, they pocketed in 2011 one billion dollars (you heard that right) in profit. You would think that with that money they would have a decent website… Well you would have guessed wrong, the SAQ.com is a combination of bad user interactions, bad design, and refreshed sections that looks ok but inconsistent with the brand.
More than I can chew?
When I first played with this idea I really wanted to do a complete how-to guide to fix the website, but the more I was getting deeper into the subject the more I found that would take an enormous amount of time. Instead what you have here is a simple overview of the most atrocious problems.
The guide
You can read the complete analysis here and also get all the files (including a small axure prototype) on github.