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I have spent tens of hours maintaining a spreadsheet for black friday deals on chromebooks, so I'm intimately familiar with this. Similar to the author, I would

by soared 8y ago

I have spent tens of hours maintaining a spreadsheet for black friday deals on chromebooks, so I'm intimately familiar with this. Similar to the author, I would usually find the laptop I wanted, google "laptop name spec sheet" and skip the marketing page and go right to the technical page. The worst offendor is HP - their black friday deals page is brutal: * Can't open links in new tabs * No filter/sort options * No copying and pasting of text * Manually ajax button click to load more products * Clicking through to a product then pressing back resets the previous page, so you have to scroll all the way down then click to load more results, two times I almost excluded hp from my spreadsheet because it was so time consuming compared to other brands!

hyperman1 8y ago
I know of a small branch office which has to buy HP laptops approved by the corporate HQ. So HQ decides on a small number of approved HP configurations for the next few months(I think normal, developer, mgmt). Then the branch offices goes to the HP site and selects how many of each it wants to have. In a recent redesign of the HP site, they can't even see what they are going to get: Has the 'normal' specification of this month 4 or 8 GB RAM? Who knows? If you phone your HP representative, they say they don't know, go ask HQ. Then again, the laptops HP delivers are all shoddy quality. Every week, some key or whatever breaks off one of them. Getting a replacement part takes 2 or 3 months and sometimes the replacement part itself turns out to be damaged. Also, if you order a new laptop today, HP can't deliver them until next year. End users trying to get work done desperately cling to the old DELLs of 5 years ago, so HQ actually decided to forbid upgrading these DELLs to windows 10 in order to finally get rid of them and get some sales for HP.
ken 8y ago
These are excellent examples of problems which aren't explained by their claims that "All of it’s based off of user interactions data and information". Which target market, exactly, do they think benefits from a product website which stops you from opening a product link in a new tab? I'd love to see some data which supports that.
- soared 8y ago
  I can imagine some twisted data-driven logic. Bad ux -> difficult to compare -> users more often purchase the first few devices they look at -> design site with bad ux and expensive products at the top of the page
Steve44 8y ago
I found the new HP driver download site is similar to your description. It changed a couple of years ago and I find it horrible to use and incredibly frustrating. You can't look at a driver then go back to the same page layout, I think it does the search again and leaves the sections minimised. ESET downloads is similar, it used to be just a list and each one had a download link. Now for each product you need to select a couple of dropdowns to get the correct file version, tedious and annoying. I think it's just the way web design is going, they are removing functionality and turning it into something that looks like a two year old child's colouring book. Generally the amount of information has been reduced, and what little websites do publish is buried.

by soared 8y ago

hyperman1 8y ago

I know of a small branch office which has to buy HP laptops approved by the corporate HQ. So HQ decides on a small number of approved HP configurations for the next few months(I think normal, developer, mgmt). Then the branch offices goes to the HP site and selects how many of each it wants to have. In a recent redesign of the HP site, they can't even see what they are going to get: Has the 'normal' specification of this month 4 or 8 GB RAM? Who knows? If you phone your HP representative, they say they don't know, go ask HQ. Then again, the laptops HP delivers are all shoddy quality. Every week, some key or whatever breaks off one of them. Getting a replacement part takes 2 or 3 months and sometimes the replacement part itself turns out to be damaged. Also, if you order a new laptop today, HP can't deliver them until next year. End users trying to get work done desperately cling to the old DELLs of 5 years ago, so HQ actually decided to forbid upgrading these DELLs to windows 10 in order to finally get rid of them and get some sales for HP.

ken 8y ago

These are excellent examples of problems which aren't explained by their claims that "All of it’s based off of user interactions data and information". Which target market, exactly, do they think benefits from a product website which stops you from opening a product link in a new tab? I'd love to see some data which supports that.

soared 8y ago
I can imagine some twisted data-driven logic. Bad ux -> difficult to compare -> users more often purchase the first few devices they look at -> design site with bad ux and expensive products at the top of the page

Steve44 8y ago

I found the new HP driver download site is similar to your description. It changed a couple of years ago and I find it horrible to use and incredibly frustrating. You can't look at a driver then go back to the same page layout, I think it does the search again and leaves the sections minimised. ESET downloads is similar, it used to be just a list and each one had a download link. Now for each product you need to select a couple of dropdowns to get the correct file version, tedious and annoying. I think it's just the way web design is going, they are removing functionality and turning it into something that looks like a two year old child's colouring book. Generally the amount of information has been reduced, and what little websites do publish is buried.