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My search for a bookcase starts on ikea.com, where I navigate to the bookcase section, in the hope to get an overview of the different series. I find instead a
by dkarl 7y ago
My search for a bookcase starts on ikea.com, where I navigate to the bookcase section, in the hope to get an overview of the different series. I find instead a listing of all 257 bookcase products, including accesories, such as hinges and extra shelves. The full listing not give me an overview, however, and I do not find anything useful.
An impatient customer could have given up at this stage
This is thinking from the perspective of someone who can take advantage of a logically structured site. I can tell you that when engineers think this way, the result is usually serviceable as a first pass, but product comes back with requests that make you rethink everything. To play devil's advocate, I can guess the goal with this first page of results might be to show enough different kinds of results that users will keep pressing "Load More" until they find what they want. Imagine somebody comes to the site for parts for their bookshelf, searches for "bookshelf," and sees nothing but complete bookshelves in the first page of search results. They aren't going to scan the page for links to the product category they're looking for. They aren't going to "Ctl-F parts" like an HN reader. They might not even search for "bookshelf parts." They might give up right there. So product tells us we have to make sure that the first page of search results contains some bookshelves, some parts, some accessories, at least one result from each product category. That way the users will be enticed to mash "Load More" again and again until they see what they want.
Or maybe it's some other quirk of behavior that makes this design better. Or maybe they've put no effort into the design at all. I wouldn't presume to know, but on balance my money would be on engineers already having offered to make changes like the author is requesting, and product/UX rejecting those changes in favor of the current version.
- ebg13 7y ago> Imagine somebody comes to the site for parts for their bookshelf, searches for "bookshelf," and... ...is presented with two major subcategories: "bookshelves" and "bookshelf parts". Problem solved.
- eitland 7y ago> This is thinking from the perspective of someone who can take advantage of a logically structured site. I can tell you that when engineers think this way, the result is usually serviceable as a first pass, but product comes back with requests that make you rethink everything. To play devil's advocate, I can guess the goal with this first page of results might be to show enough different kinds of results that users will keep pressing "Load More" until they find what they want. In my eyes this is a variation of the HN classic: my users are so stupid I need to remove or break stuff that would be useful for 99% of my userbase.
- dkarl 7y agomy users are so stupid I need to remove or break stuff that would be useful for 99% of my userbase Yes, that's what engineers often sound like when we try to interpret the conclusions of usability professionals. We get frustrated because the features that we would find easiest to work with are not necessarily the features the product should have. I'm not saying I'm a UX professional who does know better than engineers; I'm just saying that as engineers we should get used to the fact that what is horrible design from our perspective is often the result of careful work done with a more representative sample of users.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoPerhaps I'm just too much of an engineer. But I'm finding it hard to imagine how anyone would find it easier rather than harder to choose a bookcase when IKEA's search results include media units, shelves, doors for kitchen cupboards, hinges for doors for kitchen cupboards, and doll furniture. To be fair, the experience is as confusing and distracting as wandering through a store, so perhaps it really is deliberate.
- eitland 7y agoStill I suspect people are applying this out of context: When people are designing business applications, ecommerce software etc using ideas from Google and Twitter, companies that are trying to eke out the last percent of usability, and in the process destroys their product for everyone else I don't think it is smart. Case in point: Google has lost me and I guess a number of other engineers as users and evangelists because their software just doesn't cut it anymore after 10 yeas of dumbification as it now too often refuses to respect even double quotes and verbatim setting.
- perl4ever 7y agoGoogle will now take a three or four word search and remove precisely the critical phrase that makes it useful at all. Like, I was looking for "New York XYZ" and it cheerfully spits out top hits with "New York" crossed out.
- mobjack 7y agoA lot of IKEA's products are highly modular and you have to buy the individual parts to create a full product. Their pricing strategy is to set base products relatively cheaply, but the have higher markups on additional accessories for customization. This does create design challenges that other furniture stores don't have to deal with.