Opinion on Parfumo website

Hello everyone, I'm a fan of our community and the core concept and message of Parfumo.com. However, I find the website extremely unwieldy and unnecessarily complex. There were so many times I felt completely lost and couldn't find a certain feature or option, even though I've used it before. It's such a shame that this site doesn't have a  good user experience (UI/UX) in my opinion.

What're your thoughts on it? are you sharing the same frustrations and are there any specific things that annoy you?

I find the experience quite good actually. What are your gripes?

I really find it user-friendly and okay. I only would want to see more reviews maybe.

Adding a perfume to a wishlist is somewhat hidden on a perfume page. Not only that but the whole action buttons sector, such as collection, review and so on are strangely placed. It’s all over the place and not coherent in my opinion.

There’s no submit button when rating a fragrance, but for reviewing there is. Same with "smell similar" which is in another sector altogether. The first time I used both features, I didn’t know if my changes were saved or not. I don’t know why my "similar smell" suggestions are even hidden under another button in the first place.

The „See Prices“ button could be realized a bit more intuitive on perfume pages. Like you would expect from Google and other sites, that show you the listings on the same page.

I don’t know how I can subscribe to certain Perfumes in the souk and add them to my watchlist. Adding individual listings to my watchlist is possible, however, you first need to open „view my souk“ and then click on "watchlist", which is not intuitive.

When I write someone a message in the souk listing, I can’t see the actual product I was inquiring about when I click on my mailbox later on.

In my user profile, I can see my collection, which is also available as a separate page when you click on it. You can’t infer that from just having your user profile open. Same with top picks, which you can only access when you click on your user icon in the upper right corner of the screen.

I don’t know why it lists the links to the collection, my ratings and so on in the first place when you have already a link to your user page. They are already sub-sectors of your profile anyway. It’s strange to list them there and makes things just bloated.

Notes, blog and assistant are also strange features in my option and add unnecessary complexity. For example, I don’t know how I can see the blog of another user. It doesn’t show up on their profile pages. So what's the point of having them anyway?

Overall, there are a lot of things that are too convoluted, hard to find and easy to miss, which is really a shame.

In general, I'm very satisfied with the Parfumo UI. In comparison to "that other site", Parfumo has a lot more features. It thus requires a bit longer learning experience because with more features comes more complication. Also, the look and feel seems much more up to date whereas "that other site" seems at least 20 years old and is clumsy in some aspects. 

There are two things that I miss from Fragrantica: 
1. the running list on the right side of the most current reviews with one button to go to a page with all the reviews from today. 
2. the slightly more compact perfume icons which allow the concurrent display of more shelves on a page

Those are pretty minor.  The Parfumo UI experience is way better, IMO.

I agree with you that it's the best perfume community page on the web, however you can still have complexity and intuitiveness at the same time. Look at YouTube for example. Even AWS or Microsoft Azure, which are way more complex, but still easier to use.

I work as a cloud engineer and web designer, which is why I notice things a bit differently on the web I guess. It's good though to hear other peoples opinions as well.

I think it's pretty good all in all. Some features could be a little more intuitively placed, but I'd rather take a minute to learn how it works than have another awful dumbed-down site that spams you with sponsored content, unnecessary videos and AI generated bullshit. The internet nowadays is so boring, simple and overly fast-paced sometimes. At least Parfumo still feels real and not like an influencer hellscape. Sorry, I'm not usually the backwards type, but I miss the old web 😭 

Things that could be improved:

- Reviews should be above statements, like it was until recently
- We should be able to switch off the translated reviews, the auto translation is awful and makes the German reviewers sound crazy

Some explanations and a different perspective on your points:

There are two options to add a perfume to your wishlist:

1. Perfume page -> collections -> wishlist
2. Your page -> collections -> wishlist -> add

I think its pretty neat that things get saved automatically and you don't have to manually submit everything. Even reviews get saved as a draft automatically. It makes sense that they get a submit button, I mean how could it work without one? That way, there would be lots of unfinished reviews.

Agree that the extra page for your own "smells similar" suggestion is a bit unneccessary. It would also be cool if we could add more than one.

You can subscribe to souk offerings of a perfume here:

Perfume page -> subscribe -> offers

I agree that this is not very intuitive, it should be placed under "souk".

The rest of this is because Parfumo is meant to be mainly a community and isn't supposed to feel like a sales site. The souk is supposed to be a small extra. 

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. Listing all your collections and ratings directly on the start page of your profile would look extremely cluttered?! Maybe I misunderstand something. Or are you against having several ways to go to the same pages? As far as I know, this is normal and wanted in web design, isn't it?

You can see a user's blog on their profile. It's between the statements and the photos. If there's nothing, they haven't written any articles yet.
The point of blogs is obvious: To have a place to share detailled opinions about perfume-related topics that go beyond reviews of single fragrances. Even though I have not written a blog post (yet?), I think it's a really great feature that makes Parfumo stand out. It's a low-key way to publish quality content without having your own site that you have to promote.

Notes are only for yourself, like a statement or review, but private. I don't use it, I use my notes app for that, but it never bothered me.

The assistant is another really good and useful feature, especially for those with bigger collections. You can see which fragrance you wore when (like a diary) and also find out which ones you wore the most often. And you can get inspiration on what to wear when you're unsure.

If all the special features would be removed for the sake of having an easier UI, Parfumo would turn soulless and boring in my opinion. There is room for improvement in terms of the placement of some features, but it's good to have them all. And hey, it still looks sleek and modern and doesn't have that crowded 1998 geocities vibe like a certain other page  

Found something I do miss: When you want to 'discover' scents by 'type', one can't choose both 'floral' AND 'spicy' for instance. Just 'floral' OR 'spicy'. So if you'd want to search for a floral/spicy scent by doing one, single action, that is not possible.

  

Hi Degoya, 
You are correct in your observation about the functioning of the page. It is a small deficiency in the management - set of stored digital files., something very difficult to deal with, when handling many digital files.
Honestly it's a good Site., Good visual design, content, much better reviews than any other site, performance and loading speed. but for me, its deficiency is in the architectural form of the web., I mean, its internal structural model. the way in which a website is organized through its internal linking.
It can be mapped and renewed, but it will take time. 
I hope they can take a look at these things, so the site works better.

For me, adding a perfume to your wishlist is an essential feature and should be on the very top of the perfume page, easy to find. That's for example I couldn't find in the beginning, until I found out that you have to click on collection first.

I think they should still give the user a haptic feedback when it's automatically saved. For example through a toast notification or something like that.

Thank you. I didn't know that. Something new learned today.

There are two things I was talking about in my statement. The first thing is, that when you go on your profile page, you can click on the headings of "Latest Reviews", "Collections", "Wall" and so on. However, there is no real indicator for someone that is new to the site, that you can click on them in order to open there dedicated pages. There's no button or link that states "see more" or "open" except for you wall maybe.

The second thing is. If you can already access them through your user profile, why is there a need to add them to the box that open when you click on the user profile in then top right corner of your screen. Less is more sometimes to give you a better overall view.

Don't get me wrong I'm not against features. I believe that if you have a website with a certain amount of complexity, It's vital to know where and how to to place them to make it easier for the user to find and use. Look at Google for example. It has a lot of functionality. However, the main focus is the searchbar and getting a list of relevant links.

I think it started very simpel and they have built on top of it with every new iteration. Because it scaled since then by a margin and they keept building on top of that foundation, it can make it very hard to implement new features. That's my assumption at least. 

Parfumo has a lot of potential and still room to grow. I'm excited to see how it will evolve. 

You right, those are facts.
But I repeat, renewing it and maintaining the initial foundation would be a quite difficult task. 
Parfumo has a lot of potential ) agree., and Its popularity is growing.

Too easy when scrolling on mobile, to change the score of a perfume, by just being near the stars/ rating