Best shopping sites

I recently ran a question on LinkedIn to ask people which websites they voted as the best for user experience. What came back was a lot of the usual suspects, Amazon, GMail, Google, but a few shopping sites came up too and I thought it best to share…

Yoox.com is a very stylish site, which suits its image as an apparel brand conscious service. It is not only easy to use with handy menu items and easily categorized clothing and accessories, it is, at the very least, sexy which goes to show that you can have your cake and eat it too. I have to thank my good friend Jen Smit for the heads up – this is going to be a firm favourite. Though, a word to all those on slow internet connections, you may battle with this rich site, but if you needed a reason to upgrade (and a little something from Armani), this is it.

Netaporter has been around for a while, and for good reason. Fashion aficionados have been using and raving about it for some time.  Like Yoox it is easily navigable and if you’ve got the kind of bank balance that I only dream of then go and pick up a pair of Lavins on sale.

Both these sites work on the idea that the easier and more pleasurable the online shopping experience is, the easier it is for shoppers to part with their cash.

My new favourites are the social shopping sites like Kaboodle where you can shop using recommendations from fellow shoppers. A great feature of this is setting up wish lists for you birthday so that friends and family know exactly what you’re hoping for without actually having to ask the tedious question. Of course, it requires you to have yet another online profile… For a list of social shopping sites try this bit from About.com.

Remember the tractor

Been reading a lot of great articles at Boxes and Arrows and am entrigued by all the information and disciplines that User Centred Designers (for want of a better term) have at their fingertips. I come from a background of web applications via online learning services, mobile email clients and IPTV, amongst others, and the shere volume of application of the design process is pervasive across so many disiplines.

At some stage, I suppose, processes were quite simple. My father is a farmer and while he works too many hours a day (out in the sunshine mind you, so it’s not that bad) his processes are defined by the cycle of the seasons, the size of his cattle herd and a monthly list of payments to make and make sure come in. His life is hands-on with nature and is thus guided by it. Those companies who make the tools of his trade should understand that a tractor be simple to use and so the ones my Dad loves are the ones that start with a  key, have a few simple gears and are easy to hitch up to trailers. Oh, yes, and it’s important that they should be fixable  in his own workshop because a farmer is, by nature, self-sufficient. Give him something new and shiny with loads of knobs and an LCD display and he will look on interestedly but will no doubt never dream of parting with his hard-earned money for something new fangled that has to be sent away when one of the computer bits goes “bang”.

These days processes are more complicated, they have wide reaching implications and are often driven  by the company strategy to retain customers or reduce costs. Like fancy tractors, the strategy to sell more tractors and make the tractors do more forgets the fact that the person driving the tractor has only a few basic requirements: it starts, it stops, it goes backwards, forwards and doesn’t go “bang”. While the technology to enable bigger, better, faster, might be there and growing everyday it doesn’t mean that the tractor driver wants anything more than a tractor.

We, who work with technology everyday, want to push the boundaries, shake things up, “progress”, need to remember that most users don’t care. People don’t like intimidating knobs and fancy LCD screens, and even those who do go out and buy fancy new pieces of equipment because they simply must have it, often play with it for a while and then return to using their older, simpler tool.

Not a new idea, I know, more like a commandment:

“Though shalt remember the tractor”.