Patek Philippe launched its first website in 1997, the year after it presented its now-famous “Generations” advertising campaign and the Patek Philippe Magazine. Twenty is a mature age for a website and it even predates our own 16-year presence on the web. As we know ourselves at WorldTempus, such a long history also provides valuable experience of the evolution of the worldwide web and a wealth of visitor data that can be used to design a website around the needs of its users.
The patek.com website has been revised several times in its history, the last one dating back five years. For its sixth revision to mark its 20th anniversary, the site has been given a total revamp to bring it right up to date with the latest trends, technologies and user habits. Analysis showed, for example, that more than half of the site’s visitors were viewing it on a mobile phone, so the new site was designed with a mobile-first philosophy and has been optimised with a responsive design that automatically adapts to tablet and desktop screen sizes.
The result is worthy of praise. The upper half of the screen is occupied only by the company logo and a simple menu with just three items. Below this is a full-width animation and the three latest news items from the brand. Patek Philippe has also put a lot of detail into considering the different personas of its visitors. This technical term attempts to classify visitors into different categories, which subsequently allows you to target different user experiences to them. Patek Philippe has done this with aplomb, offering a choice of basic or advanced filters for a watch finder that allows you quickly to find a watch to suit your taste.
If you already know which watch you are looking for, you can head straight to the collection page and see the full list of available models. Click on your preference and you will be given full specifications of the watch. You will also be provided with one important piece of information that has long been withheld from visitors to brand websites: the price. Like Rolex, Patek Philippe has understood the need to be transparent on prices and the welcome side-effect of doubling the clicks on its site by adding the price beneath a scroll button. It’s a simple way to confirm that the stainless-steel Nautilus with blue dial that you covet retails for 21,900 Swiss francs. The only information that Patek Philippe doesn’t provide is an indication of waiting list of several years that most retailers will give for this model.
Company history and information is regrouped under the single “Company” heading, while “Retail & Service” collates all the information relevant to existing and new customers, from the location of retailers and service centres to owner registration and requests for extracts from the archives.
If you still cannot find what you are looking for, then there is a search function. But in our own experience, internal search engines can develop a mind of their own. Even though the search engine on patek.com is powered by Google custom search, the results do not always correspond to the search. Given the significance of waiting lists for the Nautilus models, I searched for this term, just to see whether there was any mention of them among the 575 pages of information in each of nine languages that the site uses. The search returned six results, none of which contained a single mention of the word “waiting list” on the page in question.
