REI Co-op – Shop Outdoor Gear

EDIT: the issues with the reviews seem to have been resolved so I’m changing from three to four stars. Pictures are still slow to load. The layout and most of the app as a whole is great. It’s easy to use and I can find what I want. However, there are some very frustrating issues: -Often, product reviews don’t load. There might be a rating based on six reviews and when I try to open them to read, it tells me “There are no reviews for this product.” -Pictures sometimes take a ridiculous amount of time to load. I click on a picture, place my phone down, and when I pick it up minutes later it’s not loaded. This is very frustrating. -Reviews for products aren’t available from the REI garage. If a product is from the garage, even if it is a regularly purchased and popular item and has been reviewed many times, reviews just don’t show up from te garage side unless they’ve been purchased there. This is very frustrating because I buy much of my gear from the garage and can’t read reviews without exiting and opening the “other side” of the app. This seems like it should be a simple fix.

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It’s actually not as easy as it should be to get to the online store. if I’m going on the app, I want to look at the store. If I wanted to look at nearby trails, I would just go to AllTrails, which is a much easier and more efficient way to search for outdoor activities. Second, they don’t save your cart. This is really basic and has been done by every other online retail outlet for years. So, every time either the app updates or you get distracted and leave the app for awhile, you lose everything that was in your cart (the “saved for later” remains, but nothing that was in your cart). Third, the way the store is arranged is not great. If I’m trying to find a specific product, it’s usually in the category you would expect, but sometimes you have to search for the name or brand of the product to find it. I find this is especially true in the camp kitchen section, but it also happens in clothing. Presumably other areas, but I haven’t noticed. Finally, every other app can open from safari. Why not REI? If I get an email about a product or products and click on the link, I either have to find my membership card to buy it on safari or search for it on the app, which is not as intuitive as it should be, and risk losing it when I answer a phone call or have to run an errand or whatever.

I love the convenience of the application on my phone. It lets me do almost everything that the desktop full website does. But there are some UI issues. On the screen where the products are shown in a grid with tiles there is some text overlapping when a product has a discount. In reviews the more lengthy reviews which don’t fit on the screen can’t be seen in whole. Please add scrolling to the reviews. More than once I had to switch to my desktop in order to read reviews. I have an old iPhone 8 and it’s possible that the application is designed for bigger newer phones in X-series. But there are lot people out there who still use older phones like iPhone 7 and iPhone 8. Please fix the UI.

I love REI in general; my feedback here is specific to the app. The one issue I’d fix above anything else is to avoid blocking the UI with full-screen spinners unnecessarily. When the user taps the back button to go to the previous screen, or returns to the app from somewhere else, blocking everything with a painfully slow reload is very frustrating. Instead, keep the UI unblocked, make a background network call to check for updates, and then update the UI when the updates are received. I know that the current user flow guarantees that whatever is displayed is always 100% up-to-date, but it’s not worth the performance hit.

The new updated app is amazing! The UI is much simpler, cleaner, and modern. The spinning compass doesn’t impede the middle of the screen anymore, and appears inside of clicked buttons. When the compass does appear in the middle of the screen, it makes sense that it is. The navigation bar at the bottom is helpful to get to different potions of the app much faster and follows Apple design. Many of Apple’s default apps as well as apps from major tech companies use this navigation procedure. Overall, this is a huge step forward compared to the previous app design. Huge kudos to the developers.