Zappos is one of my favorite Internet-based companies. The shoe retailer is not only known for its amazing customer service, lenient return policies, rapid logistics but also for its quirky and cluttered user experience. The site’s interface always puzzles me: how come an e-commerce platform that surpassed $1 billion in sales last year, has such a busy and chaotic layout?
Andrew Wilkinson, the founder and Creative Director of Meta Lab, a well-respected interface design agency, posted an open letter to Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, this week venting his complaints with the site’s interface and user experience. The letter is entitled “You’re Killing Me Zappos.” It raises many viable points, albeit snarky at times, that the website should be updated with clearer iconography, a more distinct visual hierarchy, more unified link styles and sharper imagery.
To illustrate his points, Wilkinson attached a mock-up of his suggested changes. In my opinion, contrary to the current design, Wilkinson’s mock-up is clean, concise and uses best practices when it comes to user experience. The main improvements are that the content is:
- More clearly delineated;
- The shopping cart is visually emphasized and flushed right;
- The search box is bigger; and
- Information about Zappos’ company culture is put front and center
These are on-point recommendations. However, I would make a few slight modifications to Wilkinson’s design criteria. For instance, some of the additional search mechanisms such as finding “narrow shoes” and “wide shoes” have been removed from the search function.
Additionally, I do not particularly like the customer testimonials at the top of the page. I think users are more focused on finding shoes rather than reading about what other customers think about their experiences with the shoes/and or company. These customer testimonials can be trickled in other states of the user experience and do not necessarily need to be the first aspect you see.
Wilkinson promoted his article by submitting the link to his post to Hacker News, a renowned news aggregation site. The post sparked a fiery discussion, debating the fundamentals of user interface design and discussing the importance of “design vs. functionality.” Below are quotes from some of the responses that tended to focus on Zappos’ functionality rather than the design.
“Ultimately, customer satisfaction comes from getting the greatest value/deal in the least amount of time”
- jaytee_clone
“What is the point of ‘user experience’ on an ecommerce site if it doesn’t boost sales?”
- japherwocky
“…’clean’ doesn’t always mean ‘better’ – despite many UX people’s unfounded insistence.”
- Potatolicious
To a certain extent, I agree with these statements. Of course, an interface should foremost provide a function. This is especially true for e-commerce websites.
A user has two general objectives when visiting an e-commerce website: 1) to purchase an item(s) or 2) to research about an item(s). Successful e-commerce websites are the ones that provide a user with a clear path to finding what they are looking for and do so fast.
The main issues with Zappos’ site do not relate to the functionality. Rather they relate to the design, which Wilkinson’s mock-up eloquently illustrate.
“the better designed web site (both usability and aesthetics) will always win.”
- jmtame
“Good design and functionality are the same thing. The saying goes form over function, not design over function. If one thing functions better than another, it can be described as better design.”
- wesruv
I could not have said it better myself – “If one thing functions better than another, it can be described as better design.” Function and design go hand in hand. If the functionality is flawed, the design cannot make it better and vice versa. Fortunately, Zappos’ functionality is not flawed: the design can only enhance the experience and I hope that Zappos take some of Wilkinson’s suggestions into consideration. Zappos is number one in customer service, but can it be number one in user experience? I hope so.
Dan Saffer last year coined the term “tap is the new click” at one of his keynotes. It seems that Dan could be right, we’re heading towards more and more “gestural interfaces” where users can interact with an interface by using hand gestures. Apple’s iPhone and lesser known projects as the Attigo TT and Jeff Han’s groundbreaking touch screen prototype are pushing the envelope.
Microsoft, the 800 pound gorilla, is also embracing this movement and recently developed Microsoft Surface a touch screen product that gives “access to digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects”. What is also impressive is the video they released called “Productivity Future Vision” that portrays a not-so-distant future where touch screen artifacts are surrounding us from newspapers, to coffee mugs and tables. Some of these will probably not be realized, but it’s definitely food for thought. Tap is becoming the new click.
Bill Scott, the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, gave a presentation entitled “Bringing Design to Life – What Engineers Wish Designers Knew” at the WebVisions conference last week. Essentially, the presentation was about bridging the gap between designers and engineers and how to bring designs to life by prototyping. One of the main points that Scott makes is that designers and engineers are in many ways wired differently. Scott says that engineers are “implementation focused” and designers are “ideation focused” and wants designers and engineers to work more closely together and think from the other role’s point of view. Looking at Netflix interface, it seems that this approach has been really successful and I fully agree with his statements. However, this also goes for User Experience professionals. We also need to think more like designers and engineers to create projects that everybody enjoys working on.
A stunning video made with the Sprint Cam V3 HD. The camera can capture video from 500-1000 frames per second, thus providing extraordinary detail and clarity.
I’ve always loved album art work. I sometimes even buy 12″ because of their innovative sleeve design. However, because of the MP3 revolution, album art has become a lesser part of the music experience. Thanks to Signal vs Noise I found this post about the site We Are Hunted. The concept of the site is similar to Hype Machine’s Popular section, it aggregates the most popular tracks in the blogosphere. But there is one important distinction, We Are Hunted displays prominent art work for each song. It’s interesting to see how that makes such a huge difference in the user experience. Music and album art need each other. Maybe there will now be a renaissance of that relationship?
Created entirely by Stink Digital, this new interactive campaign promotes Philips latest entrant into the television market, the CINEMA 21:9. Since the televisions 21:9 frame lends itself so readily to film, our friends at Tribal DDB, Amsterdam commissioned us to create a piece of filmed content that could hold its own with Hollywoods best. Director Adam Berg responded with an idea for an epic frozen moment cops and robbers shootout sequence that included clowns, explosions, a decimated hospital, and plenty of broken glass and bullet casings.
This epic film is the centrepiece of the project. On its own, it clocks in at a (totally coincidental) two minutes and 19 seconds, but Berg conceived it to work as an endless loop. Visitors to the microsite therefore have the option to spin through the films single take shot repeatedly, to stop on a specific frame, or to watch it at the preordained speed. The film also contains embedded hotspots, which, when triggered, transport the viewer seamlessly from the heavily posted film to a behind-the-scenes version of the same shot. This constant moving between two layers of reality proved one of the projects biggest and most ambitious production challenges. Other details of the online execution play off the cinematic theme; the microsites loader doubles as a credit sequence, while rich media takeover banners drive traffic to the site by teasing viewers with an original Carousel trailer. All aspects of the production, from the film shoot to web design and development, were conducted by Stink Digital.
Shoes and maps go together it seems. Zappos launched a visualizer a week or so ago that features products that are being purchased on Zappos in real time on a Google Map of the US. Not very useful, but clever nonetheless. Who knew that staring at shoe purchases would be a source of entertainment? Al Bundy, where are you know?
Designed for the Red Bull Music Academy 08, Guten Touch is an interactive installation that involves people into a natural relationship with technology. A two projected display system plus a 3m x 2m multitouch wall showcase applications designed to engage us into human friendly experiences rather than flashy and jaw-dropping visualizations. Space Invaders hitted by foam balls, pixel paintings created with brushes and digital objects holded by hands try to blur boundaries between real and digital.
