[Sigia-l] Shopping Basket

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

On 16 January 2011 20:36, Louise Hewitt <louise.hewitt at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 16 Jan 2011, at 12:50, Jonathan Baker-Bates wrote:
>
> > On 14 January 2011 11:03, Louise Hewitt <louise.hewitt at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> The abscence of a dedicated page to 'view your basket' is making me
> edgy.
> >>
> >
> > Can you explain why it's making you edgy? I can think of pros and cons,
> but
> > it would good to know what your suspicions are.
>


>  Specifcally, it's
> -not having a standard placement and behaviour for a 'see your basket' for
> users
> -risk of user's not knowing how to proceed to checkout
> -limitations on space available at a basket view for things like legals,
> payment options etc.
> -(thanks to Chris) accessibilty and browser compatibility.
>

By "not having a standard placement", do you mean the current "flap" design
puts the mechanism for revealing the flap in different places?  If so, then
that's of course a worry, but I'm not sure how it's relevant to the overlay
vs full page debate.

Similarly, I'm not sure why having the cart on an overlay would make the
"proceed to checkout" messaging any less clear. Isn't that up to how that's
presented within the UI (visual design, etc.), not a property of the
"delivery mechanism" itself? Very true there might be space limitations
though.

Accessibility may be an issue if it's built badly as both Chris and Heather
point out, but then, if you have a full page UI, and the use of the browser
back button produces bugs or unexpected behaviour because of that (form
re-submission warnings* etc.), you also have a potentially far worse problem
there that affects about 99.9% more people. Without inspecting the actual
implementation, it's hard to comment on that though.

My tuppence from my own observation is that I would not expect anyone to
have problems with a modal overlay (above caveats notwithstanding). They are
pretty common now, and have the clear advantage of keeping you in the main
context of what you are doing - something that pays dividends when you're
talking about ecommerce. Indeed, if you think of it that way, why have a
"cart view" at all if you take the user away from the shopping context? Why
not just present them with the checkout page instead? My guess is that the
cart view is simply a friendly crutch to remind them of what they will be
buying when they come out of the shopping and into the booking path. So an
overlay preserving the shopping context serves that rather well.

My concerns would therefore be pretty much the opposite of yours :-)

Jonathan

* One day, I will try to understand what that dialogue is actually trying to
say.