4 ms·

There is (was?) an absolutely fabulous answer on quora.com which detailed how this site came to be --- from memory: - initial ecommerce site was a mess (basica

There is (was?) an absolutely fabulous answer on quora.com which detailed how this site came to be --- from memory: - initial ecommerce site was a mess (basically a page-by-page recreation of the catalog?) which saw minimal usage - the redesign, which focused on usability --- notably reduced cognitive load --- resulted in an immediate uptick in orders which grew markedly for a long while until it represented the vast majority of their business EDIT: and also optimized for repeat orders on a schedule If someone could find that, or a better writeup, I'd be grateful (it's _not_ the Medium.com article) and this page: https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ is just a mentioning by the company which did the underpinnings, not the overall architect. This link is decent: https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr There was of course previous discussion of this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502 Video on why the site loads so fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ (which is from the Medium.com article)

squiggy22 1y ago
I wonder how much additional traffic, links, seo benefit and general brand awareness this site has generated simply off doing things to this standard. A fly wheel of benefits.
- alnwlsn 1y ago
  Actually, I'm pretty sure I've never seen a McMaster link in any search engine. Even if you google a direct McMaster part number, like "91251A449", McMaster will not be among the results. While the url to that product is just https://www.mcmaster.com/91251A449/ https://www.mcmaster.com/91251A449/
  - spookie 1y ago
    "Black oxide screw" on the other hand appears. Those numbers could be anywhere, on completely unrelated things. They are not a good search query.
    - alnwlsn 1y ago
      Maybe, but I never seem to have trouble searching for even further incomprehensible part numbers on other items. Give me a DigiKey part number like "WM7610CT-ND" and google finds it first thing. Digikey is also the first result for the manufacturer part number "0533980671". For my McMaster example, google gives 9 results, none of which are the McMaster site. That not specific enough? To be fair, I believe McMaster to be fairly protective of their catalog. At least their part numbers are fairly recognizable - they are usually about 10 characters long, all numbers, with an "A" near the end. That's usually enough to get me to check the McMaster site first.
      - btown 1y ago
        There's an interesting dynamic here: if McMaster part numbers are searchable on Google, people are going to use Google to search for McMaster part numbers, rather than the McMaster site itself. Which gives all its competitors a chance to bid on those long-tail keywords, or optimize for them. On the other hand, if you train people that if you want to use McMaster part numbers, you have to use the McMaster site... once you have a customer, as long as your site and inventory don't frustrate them, you have a customer for life. You're sacrificing inbound for retention, in a highly measurable and testable way, for your unique audience and/or subsets of that audience. I have no doubt this is by design.
        jaffa2 1y ago
        Great post very interesting thanks
        Nemi 1y ago
        This… is brilliant. Google and Facebook are highly lucrative because they designed a system where your profit margins (as a business) are largely sucked up by Google and Facebook by making you bid against your competitors at higher and higher values until someone is willing to give up almost all of their margins to be the top bidder for the favored “top spot”. Hypothetically, if you make $1 in profit on your product, theory says that some competitor will bid up to $0.99 to secure that sale and if you don’t bid this amount also, your sales will suffer. The end result is that Google and Facebook end up consuming all the profits for a large number of businesses online that have to survive by advertising, which explains Google’s immense profit margins. Assuming what you say is true, this is truly a ballsy move by McMaster. Betting that their website is unassailable by their competition and thus such a value-add that they can forgo playing the losing game that Google and Facebook has setup is brilliant. I have such respect for that.
  - rbinv 1y ago
    No idea if intentional or not, but the reason is this noindex directive: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, noarchive, noimageindex" />
  - dewey 1y ago
    If you have a lot of product pages (millions) it can make sense to not have all of them indexed by a search engine. If you have pages that are more profitable and might hit more keywords than some very specific product SKU it makes sense to index these primarily.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    I am not here to shill for Google, but I cannot believe that Google doesn't have a special arrangement with McMaster to index all of their part numbers! The advertising potential is very good. As a related point, I am almost sure they have special handling for programming searches to prefer StackOverflow over other sources. A few times, SO.com has made some incredibly tiny change to their webpages that made them virtually invisible to Google. After some internal email exchanges, SO.com was "fixed", and again, dominated Google programming searches. (Of course, this was 2010s... long before the AI slop era!)
- Lammy 1y ago
  Relevant: https://twitter.com/mcmasterdaily https://twitter.com/mcmasterdaily
nicce 1y ago
If you don't care about SEO, Single-page Applications usually reach the same feeling? when the components are well designed, and clicking something just fetches the parameters for the components that are primarily loaded on the initial render. But usually the implementations are poor or there is additional bloat so we don't see them as fast.
- wussboy 1y ago
  So, SPAs are the communism of the web app world?
  - nicce 1y ago
    I have no idea what you mean.
    - SilasX 1y ago
      I assume the analogy meant, "It's great in theory, but in practice no one does it right."
gwern 1y ago
I did some searching and I'm not sure the answer you remember exists. All I can find after a bunch of keyword + date-restricted searches in Google, Quora, & HN is Ibrahim Bashir (https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-UI-UX-and-developed-the-website-for-McMaster-Carr-mcmaster-com https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-UI-UX-and-developed-the-w...) who worked there 2003-2005 (https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-for-McMaster-Carr?topAns=5397568 https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-for-McMaster-Carr...) and who writes: > McMaster-Carr has a Systems department which handles internal software development, including the website. I actually worked on a lot of the front-end functionality (among other things) during my tenure there and we had 1 person who was essentially the UX lead (I'm sure the team / function has expanded since then). > > The design philosophy for the website was heavily influence by Edward Tufte and myself and several folks from my engineering team were enrolled in his course to familiarize ourselves with key concepts. > > When I interviewed with McMaster-Carr I distinctly remember a Director who told me about building the first version of the website himself and not realizing it would become "a real thing" one day. I cannot for the life of me remember his name, but he was a sharp guy and I'm sure he's off doing great things. We walked into work one Monday morning, and his desk was empty and his whiteboard said "poof". Given the timing and his description of what he did, it seems unlikely any other McMaster-Carr insider would have been writing about it, and this has to be what you are remembering, if anything. (And https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ seems useless here.)
- WillAdams 1y ago
  That's it! Thanks!
- sn9 1y ago
  This suggests having your front-end and design staff take Tufte's trainings would not be a bad investment.
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    Absolutely agree --- they are _amazing_ sessions, and if you can't make it, the books are highly recommended: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/10775.Edward_R_Tufte https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/10775.Edward_R_Tufte

squiggy22 1y ago

I wonder how much additional traffic, links, seo benefit and general brand awareness this site has generated simply off doing things to this standard. A fly wheel of benefits.

alnwlsn 1y ago
Actually, I'm pretty sure I've never seen a McMaster link in any search engine. Even if you google a direct McMaster part number, like "91251A449", McMaster will not be among the results. While the url to that product is just https://www.mcmaster.com/91251A449/ https://www.mcmaster.com/91251A449/
- spookie 1y ago
  "Black oxide screw" on the other hand appears. Those numbers could be anywhere, on completely unrelated things. They are not a good search query.
  - alnwlsn 1y ago
    Maybe, but I never seem to have trouble searching for even further incomprehensible part numbers on other items. Give me a DigiKey part number like "WM7610CT-ND" and google finds it first thing. Digikey is also the first result for the manufacturer part number "0533980671". For my McMaster example, google gives 9 results, none of which are the McMaster site. That not specific enough? To be fair, I believe McMaster to be fairly protective of their catalog. At least their part numbers are fairly recognizable - they are usually about 10 characters long, all numbers, with an "A" near the end. That's usually enough to get me to check the McMaster site first.
    - btown 1y ago
      There's an interesting dynamic here: if McMaster part numbers are searchable on Google, people are going to use Google to search for McMaster part numbers, rather than the McMaster site itself. Which gives all its competitors a chance to bid on those long-tail keywords, or optimize for them. On the other hand, if you train people that if you want to use McMaster part numbers, you have to use the McMaster site... once you have a customer, as long as your site and inventory don't frustrate them, you have a customer for life. You're sacrificing inbound for retention, in a highly measurable and testable way, for your unique audience and/or subsets of that audience. I have no doubt this is by design.
      - jaffa2 1y ago
        Great post very interesting thanks
      - Nemi 1y ago
        This… is brilliant. Google and Facebook are highly lucrative because they designed a system where your profit margins (as a business) are largely sucked up by Google and Facebook by making you bid against your competitors at higher and higher values until someone is willing to give up almost all of their margins to be the top bidder for the favored “top spot”. Hypothetically, if you make $1 in profit on your product, theory says that some competitor will bid up to $0.99 to secure that sale and if you don’t bid this amount also, your sales will suffer. The end result is that Google and Facebook end up consuming all the profits for a large number of businesses online that have to survive by advertising, which explains Google’s immense profit margins. Assuming what you say is true, this is truly a ballsy move by McMaster. Betting that their website is unassailable by their competition and thus such a value-add that they can forgo playing the losing game that Google and Facebook has setup is brilliant. I have such respect for that.
- rbinv 1y ago
  No idea if intentional or not, but the reason is this noindex directive: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, noarchive, noimageindex" />
- dewey 1y ago
  If you have a lot of product pages (millions) it can make sense to not have all of them indexed by a search engine. If you have pages that are more profitable and might hit more keywords than some very specific product SKU it makes sense to index these primarily.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  I am not here to shill for Google, but I cannot believe that Google doesn't have a special arrangement with McMaster to index all of their part numbers! The advertising potential is very good. As a related point, I am almost sure they have special handling for programming searches to prefer StackOverflow over other sources. A few times, SO.com has made some incredibly tiny change to their webpages that made them virtually invisible to Google. After some internal email exchanges, SO.com was "fixed", and again, dominated Google programming searches. (Of course, this was 2010s... long before the AI slop era!)
Lammy 1y ago
Relevant: https://twitter.com/mcmasterdaily https://twitter.com/mcmasterdaily

nicce 1y ago

If you don't care about SEO, Single-page Applications usually reach the same feeling? when the components are well designed, and clicking something just fetches the parameters for the components that are primarily loaded on the initial render. But usually the implementations are poor or there is additional bloat so we don't see them as fast.

wussboy 1y ago
So, SPAs are the communism of the web app world?
- nicce 1y ago
  I have no idea what you mean.
  - SilasX 1y ago
    I assume the analogy meant, "It's great in theory, but in practice no one does it right."

gwern 1y ago

I did some searching and I'm not sure the answer you remember exists. All I can find after a bunch of keyword + date-restricted searches in Google, Quora, & HN is Ibrahim Bashir (https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-UI-UX-and-developed-the-website-for-McMaster-Carr-mcmaster-com https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-UI-UX-and-developed-the-w...) who worked there 2003-2005 (https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-for-McMaster-Carr?topAns=5397568 https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-for-McMaster-Carr...) and who writes: > McMaster-Carr has a Systems department which handles internal software development, including the website. I actually worked on a lot of the front-end functionality (among other things) during my tenure there and we had 1 person who was essentially the UX lead (I'm sure the team / function has expanded since then). > > The design philosophy for the website was heavily influence by Edward Tufte and myself and several folks from my engineering team were enrolled in his course to familiarize ourselves with key concepts. > > When I interviewed with McMaster-Carr I distinctly remember a Director who told me about building the first version of the website himself and not realizing it would become "a real thing" one day. I cannot for the life of me remember his name, but he was a sharp guy and I'm sure he's off doing great things. We walked into work one Monday morning, and his desk was empty and his whiteboard said "poof". Given the timing and his description of what he did, it seems unlikely any other McMaster-Carr insider would have been writing about it, and this has to be what you are remembering, if anything. (And https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ seems useless here.)

WillAdams 1y ago
That's it! Thanks!
sn9 1y ago
This suggests having your front-end and design staff take Tufte's trainings would not be a bad investment.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Absolutely agree --- they are _amazing_ sessions, and if you can't make it, the books are highly recommended: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/10775.Edward_R_Tufte https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/10775.Edward_R_Tufte