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WSJ - retail sites trying to be faster and easier
Neiman Marcus Group Inc. and Saks Inc. are beefing up their men's sections and tweaking their sites to make it easier -- and faster -- for men to shop. Brooks Brothers, for instance, halved the time it takes for images to pop up to fractions of a second. And neimanmarcus.com now gives shoppers a way to view 52 ties at once in its new Tie Shop, instead of having to look at them nine at a time.
The article is positioned as a gender-difference piece, but in my experience with customers, the message applies equally well to every kind of user: the faster and easier it is to use an e-commerce site, the more money it makes. The faster and easier it is to use a media site, the more people use it. And so on.
Here at Good Experience, and at Creative Good, we've been preaching this common-sense concept for over a decade, so it's nice to see it starting to take root. It wasn't always a popular message, though. At the peak of the dotcom boom, sites like the comically overdesigned Boo.com seemed to pride themselves on how slow and hard to use they were. Of course, they're no longer in business.
Based on the article “powerless about infinite data”, faster and easier can certainly relieve the paid caused by information overloading. However, what about prices? Will faster and easier inflate the prices of products? What is the balance here? When I do shopping on-line, I always look for good prices offered by reliable vendors. There is too much information in the WWW and it is not practical to find the best “price” by going through every shop and compare their prices. I always use search to find vendors and then compare their prices and history.