8 ms·
A few thoughts: Your page feels extremely sluggish. On your site, you have to hover over things to see the prices. That's not good design. On your competitor
by chops 18y ago
A few thoughts:
Your page feels extremely sluggish.
On your site, you have to hover over things to see the prices. That's not good design. On your competitor's site, you're able to quickly scan the page (and use the mouse scrolly to get more items instantly). I see the scrolly does work on your horizontal scrollbar, but it's slow, and counterintuitive. I didn't even think to use the scrolly to move back and forth. Intuitively, the scrolly is a vertical thing.
Key phrase: Form follows function. I would almost certainly not want to buy something from your site because it takes the whole point of ecommerce (find and buy quickly) and replaces it with the brick and morter approach (find something, check the price, set it down, check something else), and does so sluggishly (clicking left and right, or using the little js scrollbar takes like 5-10 seconds to load - way to slow).
Your site looks nice and clean, but that's about it. I wouldn't call it usable at all.
Make it usable, make finding something fast.
Addendum: I think the biggest problem with the usability of your site is the excessive reliance on js animation. My machine isn't exactly old (core2duo, 4gig ram), and it feels like playing a modern FPS game on a netbook.
What's wrong with just using a div with overflow:auto, rather than over-designing it.
Another thought: perhaps allow the bottom part to stretch fill the whole page, so that you can see more items at a time. Perhaps some scale-option to decrease or increase the scale of the pictures allowing more detail and less items perpage, or less detail and more images?
- richcollins 18y agoSorry about the performance issues. The site is implemented in pure javascript. We are still working out the kinks in slow browsers.
- chops 18y agoFunny, as you posted that, I was adding my "excessive js animation" addendum.
- mrtron 18y agoThe back button working even with the zooms to the next level is KEY for your audience. Well done.
- jonknee 18y agoIt shows up as a blank page for me, with Firebug noting a Javascript error. Seems to work fine in Safari. It wouldn't hurt to make your site be able and degrade smoothly. At least show me a message that something happened, right now it just looks like you don't exist. Having it able to degrade would also let you get search engine traffic.
- chops 18y agoIndeed. Unless it has some user-agent detection for Googlebot and other search spiders, it's completely immune to search engine spiders. I think it'd be a worthwhile experiment to add an HTML version (like Gmail) just to see the results. It should be easy enough to retain the design without all the excessive javascript. And I'm sure a super-simple version would take much less time to develop than the current pure-js approach.
- richcollins 18y agoYeah that only happens when you have FireBug -- need to fix that one