[Sigia-l] Visual shopping

[Paola Kathuria]

Ziya Oz wrote:
> <http://browsegoods.com>
> I'd be interested in peoples' reaction to this UI paradigm.

Putting aside the accessibility issues, this site has to be
the biggest pile of crud I've seen in a long time.

It's the same kind of approach to solving a problem where the
designers seem to have no domain knowledge. It's like the idea
that adding voice and pictures to online chat make it a
'better' experience. But it annoys me more that some people will
think "ooh, interactive" and write about it. It'll probably win
an award. *sigh*

Specific gripes:

1) They've reintroduced distance in browsing when, ultimately,
I'm sat in front of a fixed screen. I don't want to have to
traipse from department to department or from aisle to aisle
when shopping online. Online shopping is supposed to be
convenient, and not supposed to recreate off-line hassles of
things being in different shops and places.

2) You have to zoom in a long way before you start seeing any
products.

3) The highest zoom produces a "not available at this scale"
message - what? shopping is now at Google Maps?

4) Pictures are too small.

5) There's not enough item detail.

6) Item detail is on another web site (that I have to
wait to load)

7) Clicking on the landscape doesn't center where one clicks.

8) There's no mechanism to have a clue where in the plan
you're browsing.

  How much more is there to see?
  Am I at the edge?
  Am I in the middle?
  Am I done yet?

A small device that shows the current visible window relative
to the pane would solve this.

9) It's quick to get lost (which maker am I looking at?)
if you zoom in enough to get decent thumbnails.

10) search only works within the current department.

11) clicking a results thumbnail following a search doesn't
show the item in the landscape.

12) I shouldn't have to traverse a pre-defined categorization
tree to see what's there.

13) Stuff in the real world doesn't follow a tree structure
and so it's a bizarre way to navigate (and hardly "browsing").

Misguided and really awful.


The dottedpair web site says "Most shopping sites have thousands of
products but on their sites it is hard to see more than a few dozen
products at a time. We let you see hundreds of products all at once."

Sure, as smudges.

I hate small thumbnails on online shops and so when I designed
my own jewellery shop I put all items on one page (~100). By
default, thumbnails are 100px in two columns but visitors can
change this to see more thumbnails in a screenful (50px in
three columns) or bigger pictures and more detail (250px) in
a single column.

dottedpair also say that "more than 25% of purchases are unplanned,
and happen through undirected browsing." Do you think they got
funding to support the 25% rather than the 75%?

I also looked into http://zlio.com/ recently - another shop
portal with a very poor interface when creating a shop despite
using the latest web 2.0 wizardry. It's clear with both these
sites that the designers didn't actually used their own
sites in earnest to find out how painful they are to use.


Paola
--
http://www.paolability.com/