7 ms·

There is widespread realization that people don't care about YOUR website YOUR company or how smart YOU are - you might want to stand out and be cool - but peop

• coldtea 4y ago
  One would think that "people want to do THEIR business be done with it and go on with their lives", but actually people fall for branding and "aspirational" themes more often than not. Especially the people with the money.
• marban 4y ago
  And that's how the race to the bottom starts for your brand.
  • LaundroMat 4y ago
    I don't understand your comment. There's a lot of value in a brand that promises you'll get what you came for, efficiently (and of course, delivers on that promise).
    • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      I want to agree but there's a lot of counter examples.
      • ctrlmeta 4y ago
        Cite some of those counter examples. Not being snarky. It would be nice to see what those counterexamples are. Good to see a topic from opposite perspectives.
      • LaundroMat 4y ago
        There are companies that deliberately aim to serve as efficiently as possible. A lot of thought goes into communicating and delivering on that promise in everything these companies say and do. Letting people get what they want efficiently isn't that easy to do. Bad branding is when there's a gap between what a brand promises and what you actually get. A store that promises efficient shopping but just puts stuff on shelves in wrapped packs of twelve, isn't really helping you efficiently get what you want. There are indeed a lot of examples of this (in all industries). But that's because these companies don't put any thought into what they want to be seen as and how they can (continuously) deliver on their promise. So the promise itself (e.g. "no-frills supermarket" or "amazing shopping experience") is irrelevant, as long as the promise is fulfilled. Whether there is a market for a promise is another thing altogether, but we're discussing whether positioning your store as the most efficient place to get what you want is detrimental to the brand, which it isn't, as long as you deliver on that promise.
• polishdude20 4y ago
  I like to think of it as delivering our basic needs as efficiently as possible. Food. Get out of the way and let me buy the food so I can eat it. Streaming site. Get out of my way so I can experience a story and feel connected to other human beings.
• theelous3 4y ago
  The McMaster website always comes to mind: https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/ Or the reason I walk two minutes farther to a different place for my shopping - they have self checkouts fueled by a single queue. Far more efficient than the closer and cheaper place. Utility first, uncompromisingly always. This is why we still use terminals. This is why I drive a smaller less cool granny car. It's why people still ride old terrible singlespeed bikes in denmark, and it works. It's why messy desktop icons can be peak efficiency. It's why everything good is good.
  • _fat_santa 4y ago
    I always make the "website" / "webapp" distinction. A website would be the landing page to a product, whereas a website would be like the site you posted. To the former i say go nuts, if I'm exploring a product and I land on your landing page, feel free to completely surprise me with web design. However, if you operate a webapp, Spotfiy, Gmail, Amazon, etc, settle on a "core UI" and don't change it. People don't want creativity in these kinds of sites, rather they want consistency. I guess it all boils down to, it's all about the time and place.
    • theelous3 4y ago
      I don't like this distinction much. The way you use the term website here is as a descriptor for splash pages nobody cares about beyond their use as a business card. You can see it in the way you're talking about them like "they don't matter - so do whatever you want". And you're right. But I find that unsatisfying. We should be able to have it both ways - interesting aesthetic alongside utility.
    • JadeNB 4y ago
      > I always make the "website" / "webapp" distinction. A website would be the landing page to a product, whereas a website would be like the site you posted. To the former i say go nuts, if I'm exploring a product and I land on your landing page, feel free to completely surprise me with web design. The first occurrence of "website" in the second sentence was supposed to be "webapp", right?
  • 4y ago
• smokel 4y ago
  I like a nice atmosphere when I go shopping for groceries. It's part of my life as well, and I might as well enjoy it.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    How much are you willing to pay for that? As long as the place is clean and well stocked with fresh items, anything else is worth approximately 0% to 5% to me.
    • lukas099 4y ago
      I am willing to pay more to save time. I like my Trader Joes because I can browse every aisle in a matter of minutes. It's also a good place to discover new food items. Finally, this is a personal pet peeve of mine, but I am willing to pay more to not have a shopping cart with a bad or noisy wheel.
    • Ebree 4y ago
      They choose more expensive shops arguing better variety or quality but in reality they just want to be in that group buying in more expensive brand shop, walking the same corridors as welthier or more wasteful people. In small towns they are afraid of being noticed by neighbours in cheaper shops - despite it being logically right place to see them, they feel their opportunities and prestige rises when they meet their boss in the same shop. It escalated into creation of galleries milking young generation greedy of showing off. If displaying a hologram of your social media avatar with qrcode above your head was possible they would pay to do this, the more expensive it would be the more eagerly. But of course there is also the middle class's deep wisdom of "the poor can't afford paying twice for a product" - pointing out modern quality problem. But every reason in time gets covered by a custom, for longer than reason exists.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    There's a big difference between "grocery store is clean and nice" and "grocery store is setup in a cruel imitation of Ikea designed to force you to wander past every single endcap in an attempt to milk you for maximum dollars".
• francis-io 4y ago
  These days I try to avoid physical shops as much as possible. Here in the UK, we have a "supermarket" called Ocado. If you haven't heard of them, please look them up on Youtube[0]. They don't have any physical shops I know of, but have recently started stocking M&S products. They are known in the UK to usually be more expensive, but good quality. It might be the Whole Foods of the UK. They run warehouses with a grid of rails and seem to be on a mission to automate as much of the logistics and delivery of products as possible. The website allows me to set up a regular weekly order, I can edit it up until the evening of the day before to add any last minute items. I think I pay £10 a month for unlimited deliveries over £40. Having someone bring a weekly food shop to your door for £2.50 is a great deal. Not only is this a super easy to get food shopping done each week, I can do it from the comfort of my desk (great for when Retros get a little boring!). It also stops me impulse buying things. I know I already have a December 23rd order coming full of Christmas food and I get to avoid the packed Christmas food shoppers and the depressing Christmas decorations and music in store (I'm a scrooge). I don't want a better shopping experience, I want the best food, at the cheapest prices, delivered to me in a reliable way. I don't want to think about buying food any longer than I have to each week. [0] https://youtu.be/ssZ_8cqfBlE https://youtu.be/ssZ_8cqfBlE
  • Loughla 4y ago
    Do you eat the same meals each week? I prefer shopping in person, because it helps me fill in the days on our bi-weekly meal plan that I just couldn't come up with anything interesting to eat for supper.
  • swayvil 4y ago
    You can actually get that food pre-chewed too, for added efficiency. Comes in a big tube like caulk.
    • winnit 4y ago
      I thought it came as a dry powder you combine with water and shake?
      • 4y ago
• seydor 4y ago
  > If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back. Nice, now do s/supermarket/Apple
• sbmthakur 4y ago
  Reminds me of Clayton Christensen's jobs-to-be-done talk.
• uMeanPpl 4y ago
  The same goes for non visual things. I don’t goto YT to be mesmerized by their algorithm. I am having more fun making content with OpenCV than anything I’ve done at a cloud job in 10 years. Fingers crossed open ML implodes the tech labor industry by empowering owners of actual hardware rather than a bunch of middle men employees
• wodenokoto 4y ago
  McDonald’s is a very bad example in this case as they have very distinct store fronts and branding and pioneered the whole fast food shopping experience. They are very much a success on the shoulders of doing it differently.
  • lukas099 4y ago
    Agreed. Personally, I like the experience of going to McDonald's with friends. It is a comfy place to hang out, without feeling the pressure of staff trying to turn over tables.
  • dr_orpheus 4y ago
    McDonald's used to have very distinct storefronts, but they started remodeling most of them recently and could just as easily be a Starbucks if you replaced the yellow accents with green accents.
• pimlottc 4y ago
  > If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back. You say that but I don’t think it’s entirely true. Ask around and people definitely have strong opinions about grocery stores. This one’s dingy and that one’s organized. This one’s cramped and that one’s too big. This one is laid out weird and that one is too bright. Just because you’re not looking for a Disney-level experience doesn’t mean you’re not subtly affected (for better or worse) by all these little designed elements every time you go shopping.
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    Setting a light level and making sure there's room to move around are not really the kind of traits that make things homogeneous. The layout I don't care, I'll learn it. And the other 90% of design is up for grabs.
  • mint2 4y ago
    bread and eggs aren’t 100% fungible to everyone. So getting the right ones convenient for everyone will be hard. Some people are solely focused on the dollar price of eggs and bread and don’t care one cent about other impacts, while some others factor in things like animal welfare or organic ag. Accounting for the options makes it less cut and dry. Do items get grouped by cost level or by item category? Which gets most prominent placement? Is it consistent across stores? How many options is right for each product category?
  • ozim 4y ago
    My main point is that too many marketers/designers/software-devs think that their job is to provide "Disney-level experience". Article names it "... these regressive trends ..." - so here I disagree because not everything has to be "Disney-level experience" or even fancy. Yes I go for cleaner supermarket and do less shopping in murky ones but in a way that is discussed in article we discuss *supermarkets are all the same*. If there would be a supermarket that has some fancy shelve design or tries to surprise me each time I go there I would not care if it is clean and cashiers are supermodels - if I would have to deal with too much nuisance of their shelves to get basic stuff pay and get out.
• gumby 4y ago
  This is why I hated Flash: some designers would make the experience a game of hunting for the thing you want. Inevitably I'd just give up and not buy anything at all. This happens in the real world too. My wife wanted a Bulthaup kitchen. They were happy to give us a big book with their product line. But it wasn't a catalogue with sections for sinks, cabinets etc. Oh no, each section was photographs (basically no text) of built-out kitchens. No product names, part numbers, or prices. If you were interested in something you had to go to the shop and point at the thing in the photo to discuss it with a salesperson. A terrible company to do business with.
• hgs3 4y ago
  You can find plenty of interesting UI design in video games: 3D animated menus, non-uniform layouts like radial menus, skeuomorphic design [1], etc. and they aren't difficult to navigate. > I don't go there to wonder how cool web design might be - I go there to buy stuff or start video. A gamer starts a game so they can play it, but that doesn't stop designers from making the menu both creative and easy to navigate. They aren't mutually exclusive. If game designers can do this, then why can't everyone else? [1] https://i.imgur.com/tYuAd4w.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/tYuAd4w.jpeg