September 2000 Archives
Friday, September 29, 2000
For Fun: The Onion on over-eager graphic designers. (Thanks to 37signals for the pointer.)
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Wednesday and Thursday, September 27-28, 2000
Busy Signal: Off the website today to finish up our Holiday 2000 E-Commerce report, coming soon! It's a free report that I'll announce here on Good Experience when it's available. The short story is that e-commerce sites stand to lose an awful lot of sales this year because of poor checkout and other low-tech problems.
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Tuesday, September 26, 2000
More On Wireless: A few people have written in with comments on our wireless white paper, released yesterday. One of them, Good Experience reader Keith Pelczarski at the Motley Fool, points us to an excellent Information Week article in which he's quoted. The article is a good overview of the U.S.'s plight in the wireless market.
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Monday, September 25, 2000
The Wireless Customer Experience: Our new free white paper on wireless customer experience is now available. (Download the white paper here for free.) The "hook" of the report is that success in wireless is not primarily about technology, or investors, or strategic partnerships. Success in wireless is based primarily on a good customer experience.
The report makes several points that are rarely heard (if not outright opposed) in much of the wireless hype lately. For example:
- To succeed, a wireless service must provide a customer experience that is better than existing alternatives. (This is the most important idea of the white paper.)
- Customer experience in wireless is not the same as on the Web. (The white paper lists how content, community, and e-commerce are different on wireless.)
- Wireless devices and wireless customer experience is severely constrained. To create a good wireless customer experience and thereby succeed in the wireless industry, businesses must accept and work within those constraints.
- WAP will not succeed in the current wireless marketplace.
- The WAP protocol itself is not inherently responsible for many of the problems in the WAP customer experience.
The white paper also reviews the flaws of the U.S. carriers' strategy, summarizes WAP, discusses "inch-scale design," and gives no-hype answers to questions about Java and other technologies.
I highly recommend reading the white paper, and not just because I'm a co-author! It's a free, quick download -- just 54k. (Download the white paper here for free.)
link to this column
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Friday, September 22, 2000
On a personal note: A small digression today from the usual Web talk, but it's important. My five-year-old nephew was in a car crash last week. He received a serious injury and went into emergency surgery. Fortunately, he's doing better and will make a full recovery, but injuries like his can be avoided by following a simple safety rule: GET KIDS INTO BOOSTER SEATS.
Fortunately, my nephew was wearing a seat belt; it saved his life. But it was only a seat belt, not a booster seat, and thus he received the injury. On children's small bodies, seat belts (in a crash) can end up on the stomach or neck, causing serious injuries. A booster seat positions the belt properly, AND kids tend to prefer riding in booster seats because they sit higher and can see out of the car better.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has an excellent website with booster seat info which explains this more, including this startling statistic:
Traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for [U.S.] children of every age from 6 to 14 years.
So make sure all kids age 12 and under are always restrained properly in the back seat of the car. And a reminder to us adults -- always, ALWAYS wear a seat belt.
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Thursday, September 21, 2000
New York Times: A special e-commerce section, including a story by Ben Stein about why it's hard to produce humor online, and another story about "geek fashion," which includes a quote from little ol' me.
In other news, the results of the Flash Usability Challenge are out, including a handy page with all the Flash sites people submitted as being useful, and a link to the winning site -- Ted Baker Online.
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Wednesday, September 20, 2000
Reflect.com Lives On: Back on May 8 of this year I covered Reflect.com and the accurate review it got in Business Week, saying that it's too hard to shop on Reflect.com.
Now a Red Herring article reports that Reflect.com just got another $30 million in funding. An anonymous source was quoted in the article saying that the investors "chipped in more money to [Reflect.com] to avoid the embarrassment that would come if they abandoned it... The company has not performed that well."
Who knows how valid the speculation is, coming from an anonymous source. But it seems reasonable that Reflect would be less than successful, given that it still takes over 20 clicks just to see the first product on the site. The customer experience is poor, and since the customer experience is the key driver of a website's success, it holds that Reflect.com should be performing poorly.
Which brings up this interesting quote from the Herring piece:
In a separate interview, Redpoint partner and Reflect.com director Tim Haley said, "You need to spend lots of money to create a strong brand identity, and that's what were doing." He added that "we're going to do whatever it takes to make this company successful," including digging deep into Redpoint's pockets for a third round.
Big sigh. Spending "lots of money" to create a "brand," and totally ignoring the customer experience, is a surefire recipe for failure. How long will it take, how many failed dotcoms will it take, for people with the big budgets to start spending on the things that matter? Times are tough enough in the Net industry right now without wasting money on "branding."
link to this column
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Tuesday, September 19, 2000
Kottke.org: Jason Kottke gives his opinion of sites built in Macromedia Flash:
When it comes right down to it, Flash includes all of the functionality of HTML. A good designer could build a very simple forms-based shopping cart site in Flash that would be nearly identical to one built in HTML... [if an HTML website] succeeds because it is simple and intuitive, the Flash version would succeed for the same reasons.
Kottke's comments are in response to Webword.com's Flash Usability Challenge, which is offering $200 in prizes for people to point out Flash-based sites that are actually succeeding. In contest creator John Rhodes' own words:
I am sick and tired of people telling that Flash is great. People tell me it is cool but I think that it ruins the customer experience. I think that it should be thrown out as an e-commerce tool, except in rare cases of promotion and marketing. Maybe it is useful for entertainment, personal web sites, art and game sites, but it isn't any good for e-commerce.
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Monday, September 18, 2000
HomeDepot.com Good Feature Review
By Jen Schaeffer, Creative Good analyst
Summary: Home Depot's website makes it easy to calculate project needs.
Date of our evaluation: 7/30/00
How to get there:
1. Go to www.homedepot.com
2. In the top navigation, click "Calculators."
3. Select a project from the drop-down menu or click directly on a project.
Determining the exact amount of material needed for a home improvement project can be a challenge. Shoppers may know what room they want to paint, but not how many gallons of paint they'll need. The Calculator feature on Homedepot.com, the Web site of the popular home improvement store, makes it easier for customers to plan a home improvement project.
Customers can access the Calculators through a link in the top navigation bar. Once there, Home Depot allows them to choose the type of project (Carpet, Paint, etc.) by using a drop-down menu or by clicking on a project type listed below. If customers select Paint in the drop-down menu and click Go, Home Depot takes them to the Interior Paint Calculator page.
On the Calculator page, customers fill in fields for the room's length, width, height and baseboard height. When customers click "Calculate Now," Home Depot tells them the amount of paint required for the project. For example, if a customer has a 10 x 12 x 10 room, Home Depot tells her she'll need 1.3 gallons of paint for the walls and 0.3 gallons for the ceiling. Breaking the information down by walls and ceiling is helpful for customers who want to use different colors for each surface.
Although Home Depot does not yet offer online commerce nationwide, useful tools, such as the Calculators, create a good customer experience. By making it easy to plan a project, Home Depot may encourage customers to return frequently to the Web site and buy online when commerce is available in their area. In addition, by allowing customers to easily research and access helpful information online, Home Depot may boost offline purchases.
link to this column (includes screenshot)
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Friday, September 15, 2000
AskTog.com: Tog's column this month mentions a phrase we also use here at Creative Good, the "elephant in the living room." In our work, the phrase refers to a HUGE problem in a website's customer experience that no one is talking about, but which causes tremendous frustration to customers and the business itself.
Sometimes development teams are so close to their own site that they can't see the "elephant in the living room," which is why it's important to get feedback on the site from outside the development team. Otherwise, says Tog, the "elephant" can "trample the user experience to death, resulting in revenue losses that can be measured in the millions of dollars." (Our own research bears this out; next month we release our Holiday 2000 report that estimates several billion, with a B, will be unrealized industry-wide this holiday season, because of such "elephants.")
Tog also mentions graphic designers, who often design websites as though they were print brochures. But it's not usually the graphic designer's fault, Tog says:
It has been my experience that the graphic designer is rarely, if ever, responsible for the [problem]. You can most often find [the responsible someone] in management or marketing that comes from a static background, such as publishing, and has fallen in love with the possibilities of having swinging graphics effects such as 2 point light-yellow type on a cream background -- the sorts of effects that have infected the print medium in the last decade.
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Thursday, September 14, 2000
About Flash: For today, a couple of articles about Macromedia Flash, the browser plug-in that lots of sites (see my DrMartens.com review) are using way too much.
Flazoom.com supplies us with an excellent column about how Flash could be a good tool on the Web, but its overuse -- like creating whole sites in Flash -- ruins its value.
On Dack.com, Dack Ragus tested both the Flash and (non-Flash) HTML versions of Tiffany.com. 11 out of 12 customers performed better on the non-Flash site, though as Dack admits, the testing methodology was imperfect. (Next time, Dack, consider running listening labs -- see page 20 in our Dotcom Survival Guide.)
Dack also makes the good point that Flash, while visually exciting, doesn't provide the good customer experience most sites need:
The strength of a company's brand on the Web -- even for a so-called "branding site" -- is about more than animation, rollovers, and a pulsating soundtrack. It's also about ease of finding information, speed, and overall ease of use, or, The Complete User Experience, something most Flash sites just don't provide as well as their HTML equivalents.
Dack has also created the Flash is evil page... which is why, to get objective data, he hired someone else to run the Tiffany.com usability tests.
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Wednesday, September 13, 2000
For Fun: Florida State University supplies us with the Silicon Zoo, which shows microchips with designs sneaked in by the engineers. Dilbert, Dogbert, medieval swords and other geek favorites are all there. My personal favorite is the design that the lawyers put in -- a legal disclaimer etched in microscopic letters onto the chip. Part of the disclaimer reads, "Keep away from fire." Unbelievable.
Another fun clip comes from SatireWire, with this headline: DOT-COMS "JUST KIDDING" ABOUT BEING DOT-COMS, SAY DOT-COMS
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Tuesday, September 12, 2000
Reader Letters: Several responses came in to my DrMartens.com site review. Thanks to everyone for their feedback, positive and negative.
Andrea Longo wrote in from her job at a telecom company to say this:
I enjoyed your review of drmartens.com. Not too long ago I found that site because I was looking for somebody who would take my money in exchange for a pair of shoes, and I for certain did not find it there. Thank you for allowing me to avoid the pain of installing Flash with your detailed description. I knew there was a good reason I avoid plug-in-required sites.
Supposedly I'm the target consumer all this e-commerce is chasing after: computer savvy, high income, no time. But I regularly try to buy things off the web and give up because the site required some stupid plug-in that I don't want to waste time downloading and configuring, or Javascript that I don't want to turn on because it could do something nasty to my computer (or worse, cover my screen in stupid pop-up windows,) tells me to "Get a real browser" or has bizarre unusable navigation... I have to want something really bad to change my browsing habits, and 99% of the time it's not worth it.
Mike Rutter wrote this:
Did you know that Doc Martens also sells watches? I saw one of their watches at a brick 'n mortar store and wanted to research the details (since the store clerk couldn't tell me) online. When I went to the site, not only couldn't I find the watch but it took me a relatively long time to reach the conclusion that watches weren't addressed on the site.
I didn't buy that watch... think I'll get a Seiko.
Walter Kerschbaum wrote from Paris:
You missed the best part: the interactive map. I tried to find the DrMartens store nearest me in central Paris. As I zoomed in on France and then the Paris area, it led me uncontrollably to some God-forsaken Paris suburb on the map, while giving me store names and addresses in London!!! Really cool and very useful.
Nick Ragouzis wrote:
In this case, "the talents of the designers who created DrMartens.com" are to be downplayed. They fiddled with Flash (pursuing their own passions and affinities, and spending their client's money) when they should have been thinking about customers and their overall experience. Not to speak of their sloppy technical execution.
Stefan Bruemmer wrote in from Germany:
while checking the DrMartens.com site i found that i cannot agree with you on several points of your unfavourable review, which i consider highly subjective.
in detail, you wrote that "Next comes a 'conveyor belt' with a random assortment of shoes gliding past slowly. If you don't click on a shoe before it disappears, too bad. You'll have to wait for it to cycle back again."
this is simply not true. the images move in relation to your mouse. if you do not move your cursor, the images glide from right to left, but once you start moving your mouse, you will find that you can slow down, stop, and even revert the movement of the images.
then you complain about having to click PRECISELY (your emphasis) on a button in order to enter the site - "precisely" as opposed to what? in the light of the above i assume you use simply wish for a larger button. as i had no trouble hitting it under 1152x864 resolution, i hardly see this as relevant criticism.
earlier on you criticised the "...splash page that warns users about the plug-in requirement before entering the site". well, if you have a flash page, this is what you do as a part of proper programming, although i would prefer the term "inform" to "warn." this, to all intents & purposes, amounts to criticizing the site for being a flash site. i get the impression this is what your article is really all about: you just do not like the idea of a shop done in flash. ...considering graphics slick and sale slogans meaningless (which isn't?) makes for a gut reaction, but not for a review.
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Monday, September 11, 2000
Neiman Marcus Gets More Complex: Following the advice of the Jupiter press release that encourages e-commerce sites to add more complex technology, Neiman Marcus's new strategy is covered in an Internet Week article:
[Nieman Marcus] is following up a $24 million Web site investment with new multimedia applications that promise to make the online shopping experience more realistic... [The site] features a streaming 3-D shopping interface to display Neiman Marcus's line of Manolo Blahnik shoes.
Gosh, a streaming 3-D shopping interface! And to think, no successful e-commerce website offers 3-D shopping. What is Amazon thinking? Yahoo and AOL? Those and other top sites create a good, simple customer experience. Does Neiman Marcus actually think it can succeed with strategy that flies in the face of every top e-commerce site to date?
Yes, I know the counter-argument: Nieman Marcus sells really expensive stuff, so customers will want a richer online experience to browse it. My response: Regardless of the price of the item, customers will NEVER want to sit and wait forever for a plug-in to load... or for their computer to restart after crashing on a website's high-tech gewgaws. A good, fast, simple customer experience will never go out of style.
Thus I point you to our evaluation of the new Neiman Marcus site, which points out some basic problems in the customer experience on the site.
link to this column
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Friday, September 8, 2000
Aliens from Jupiter Land a Press Release: A press release so outlandish, at first I thought it might be a hoax. But it's for real: Net research firm Jupiter Communications yesterday announced that most e-commerce sites are too "conservative" because they don't "enhance the online shopping experience" with Java or Flash.
Now I agree that there are some ways to make Flash and other plug-ins useful to e-commerce customers, and that sites should explore these technologies. But it's just wrong to state, as Jupiter did, that "consumers expect a richer online shopping experience because of the exposure they receive through new interfaces on most sites." DrMartens.com? Boo.com? Who wants more of that? What "consumers" is Jupiter talking to?
Alex here at Creative Good makes an interesting point. Replace "richer" with "easier" and suddenly you get an accurate statement: "consumers expect an *easier* online shopping experience because of the exposure they receive through new interfaces on most sites."
Below I paste the whole press release; here's the full press release.
I have italicized everything that I disagree with.
Jupiter: Web Retailers Neglect Web Technologies, Less Than 20 Percent Use Java, Flash, and Chat Functions
Conservative Approach to Online Shopping Outdated
NEW YORK September 7, 2000 -- Not even one in five online retailers deploys well-accepted and widely supported Web technologies such as Java, Flash, or chat functions to enhance online shopping experience and close sales -- according to a new report from Jupiter Communications, Inc., (Nasdaq: JPTR). Jupiter's report advises that online retailers abandon conservative Web site development practices and optimize their interactive real estate to match the technical capabilities, of most online consumers that can support a rich interface adequately.
As audiences upgrade hardware, add plug-ins, and upgrade to faster Internet connections, the addressable consumer technology environment becomes more diverse. At the same time, consumers expect a richer online shopping experience because of the exposure they receive through new interfaces on most sites. Merchants operating in complex online product categories -- auto, real estate, home furnishings and housewares, PCs and peripheral devices, and apparel -- now have the opportunity to integrate advanced applications that can satisfy the needs and address the problems of more experienced online shoppers. Merchants must move to meet consumers' heightened expectations now as late movers will lose audience and market share.
Many retailers have designed their sites for the lowest common denominator, which is shortsighted, particularly for vendors of high-consideration goods, said Lydia Loizides, an analyst with Jupiter Communications. This practice ensures support for technology laggards, but retailers must also meet the rising expectations of experienced online shoppers. Competitive pressure will make support for advanced technologies a must-have for sites operating in the complex product market. Retailers will have to offer more to their customers than just basic textual representation, search, and price comparison.
In a new Jupiter Executive Survey of online merchants, 60 percent cited customer feedback as a primary factor in their decision to integrate advanced technologies into the user interface. However, a recent Jupiter Consumer Survey of online shoppers found that more than 50 percent of respondents indicated they would use the technology if it were available. Specifically, 56 percent said they would use items such as virtual dressing rooms, and 51 percent said they would use zoom-and-spin technology if available. [MH note: I don't disagree that Jupiter measured those survey responses; instead, I disagree with the methodology. What customers SAY and what they DO are two very different things.]
According to Loizides, merchants must proactively deploy technologies that enhance the process of searching for and evaluating products and services online, or they will lose customers to those that offer a richer online experience. PCs have evolved -- and speakers, microphones, and support for processor-intensive multimedia is commonplace -- yielding an environment in which Web ventures can integrate advanced imaging and graphics technologies, including voice and audio features creatively.
Online retailers should place technologies on a graduating scale of complexity. Web sites implement a wide range of applications that target audiences from those of low bandwidth, low-consumer technology to those on the high-end of those scales. However, marketing and technology departments of online retailers have focused on purchasing and checkout phases and hyper-focused on abandoned shopping carts and purchase forms. Loizides encourages merchants to incorporate technologies that can ease this process by including tools for product and price comparison, advanced search bots, and visualization clients that present a finer level of detail.
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Thursday, September 7, 2000
DigitalMass: An excellent article about the spread of "splash pages that do little except showcase their designers' capacity for self-indulgence." The culprit, once again, is the inappropriate use of Macromedia Flash technology.
Author Julia Lipman (a recent grad of my alma-mater, MIT -- be still my heart) writes about the splash page of a design firm named Axiomatic Design:
"Axiomatic Design," it proclaims, the plain blue words fading away. Slowly. More words that presumably describe Axiomatic Design also appear and fade away slowly. Then a quote that uses these words, to describe Axiomatic Design. Then the main page. Total time: ten seconds. Which doesn't seem like a lot, but, hey, that's ten seconds you can never get back. Not to mention nine more seconds than it would probably take you just to read the words. And what's the point of having a ten-second animated introduction if it consists of nothing but blue words fading in and out on a white background?
This is not to suggest that Flash shouldn't be used on websites. Instead, developers should only use Flash when it's appropriate -- and the very first page of a website, when visitors have no choice but to load the Flash, is not an appropriate place. Like large graphics, a Flash file should only be available when the visitor specifically asks for it. For example, on an entertainment site, a visitor asking to see a short film in Flash should only THEN be asked to download the Flash file.
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Wednesday, September 6, 2000
Customer Experience Interview: A few weeks ago I was interviewed via e-mail by Lou Rosenfeld, a friend of mine who runs Argus Associates, an information architecture company. It's pretty long, but if you have time, I recommend that you read the whole interview. Thanks to Lou and the folks at Argus for making it happen.
Below I have pasted an excerpt of the interview, showing two questions that come up a lot when we talk about customer experience: how is customer experience different from usability, and how do you measure the results of a customer experience project. (Short answer to the first question: customer experience includes, but is bigger than, usability. Customer experience is strategic and so includes other disciplines as well.)
Lou: Customer experience sounds like one of those new-fangled "disciplines," like information architecture. How is it really any different from established fields like market research or, for that matter, usability engineering?
Mark: Apples and oranges. Market research takes surveys; there's certainly a place for that in the product development cycle. Some companies in the industry make plenty of money conducting online surveys and feeding clients interesting numbers. I don't think that methodology has much depth or value to it, but sure, once in a while a survey is interesting.
Usability engineering, having grown up in the age of software, incrementally improves the tactics of the technology interface -- which is a fine process, but more suited to software than to web sites or other experience-based technologies.
And information architecture... well, I guess we'll get to that one later in the interview. Flame suit on!
Customer experience, as I said before, recognizes the customer's engagement with Web technology as a holistic combination of factors. Our customer experience work is created for the Net only, not for consumer products or software or libraries or anything else. The other methods you listed were not born on the Net and therefore tend to be less effective.
Lou: ...You see customer experience as much broader than more recognized fields like usability engineering and information architecture. But if that's true, doesn't that mean a site can have lousy usability or a poor architecture and still provide good customer experience?
Mark: The question doesn't compute. The only gauge of success for a web site is, do customers have a good enough experience that they'll return, and encourage their friends to come, too? Usability and information architecture are wrapped up in that experience; but so is the marketing, the messaging, the graphics, the layout, the business plan, the tone of the writing, everything. This isn't software, where usability -- the efficiency of a user's task -- is the key determinant of success. This is the Web, where everything is wrapped up into one package! So if you ask, "If I take out usability, what happens to the experience?", you're viewing the site through the old lens of usability again. Instead, view the site from a different perspective -- from the angle of the customer experiencing it in all its aspects, all its contexts, and THEN ask, "Is this a good experience?" After you answer that, you can try to understand how usability and information architecture contribute to that experience.
Lou: How exactly is it that you know [when] you double your clients' numbers? What sorts of science do you use to measure and validate your results? It seems like you face the nearly impossible task of quantifying or completely removing other factors, such as the exponential growth of Internet users or the results of a good marketing campaign.
Mark: Results that dramatic, tied to the day the changes launch, are hard to ignore. One recent client was monitoring a particular conversion rate on their site. For three months straight it held steady at a certain percentage. Marketing programs came and went, and the conversion rate remained the same. (Remember that Internet growth and marketing campaigns won't change the conversion rate, since if the on-site experience is bad, the same percentage of people will abandon the site.)
So Creative Good finished the project and delivered the prototypes, and the client's design team got to work implementing. A month later, the changes went live on the site -- and THAT VERY DAY the conversion rate doubled. Not a tiny five percent jitter -- but a huge step increase by 100%. During the months before the relaunch, the conversion rate was one constant number. The day our changes went into place, and during the following weeks, the conversion rate held steady at double the old rate. That's a pretty strong case for Creative Good -- which is why the client's CEO thanked us for doubling the number and promptly hired us again.
read the whole interview
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Tuesday, September 5, 2000
DigitalMass: In the wake of my DrMartens review (below), here's a news story about a decidedly simpler e-commerce site: Bose.com. Note to "brand experts": Like Doc Martens, Bose is a stylish, well-known brand; unlike Doc Martens, Bose does NOT have a flashy, unusable site that drags down the brand.
Here's a key quote from the article:
I asked Honoz Gandhi, Bose's e-commerce director for the past two and a half years, how the company approaches the Web. "Common sense," Gandhi said right off the bat (marking himself as an Internet maverick). "We wanted to be what our customers found most useful." Eureka! Will somebody please tattoo those words on the forehead of all the Web marketers who keep inflicting unreadable, unnavigable sites on us?
Good point. I can think of a few other sites to tattoo with those words -- Burton.com being one of them. On the other hand, Bose.com itself still has some room for improvement. For example, product information and the buying process appear to be in two very different parts of the site.
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Monday, September 4, 2000
Happy Labor Day to Good Experience readers in North America!
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Friday, September 1, 2000
Review of DrMartens.com: I took a quick look at DrMartens.com, the site that displays "Doc Martens" shoes and sandals. I was surprised to see many similarities between DrMartens.com and the defunct Boo.com, the high-end e-tailer that closed down because of mismanagement and an atrocious customer experience (see May 19).
Here are a few of DrMartens.com's features that are somewhat similar to Boo.com:
- The experience begins with a splash page that warns users about the plug-in requirement before entering the site.
- After the splash page is a complex interface to choose your geographical location, also required before entering the site. US-based customers must move the mouse precisely to click on a location, for some reason, in North Dakota.
- Next comes a "conveyor belt" with a random assortment of shoes gliding past slowly. If you don't click on a shoe before it disappears, too bad. You'll have to wait for it to cycle back again. And certainly don't try browsing the whole collection via the conveyor belt. Silly customer, you'll see what we think is cool enough for you to see!
- Unclear section names. Quick, what's the difference between "municipal" and "covent garden" shoe styles?
- Meaningless marketing copy. "Be a woman who gets noticed. Don't seek approval." Uhhh - what? Can I just find the shoe I want, please? DrMartens should give the pertinent information people are here for, not some clever tag line.
- The entire site is implemented in Flash. Every page takes extra time to load a new Flash file, and there are no standard interface elements, like text links or search forms. (And don't even think about e-commerce features that customers like -- comparison features, customer reviews, helpful product descriptions.) Instead, every page is a collection of slick graphics that fly, spin, zoom, and glide all over the page.
See this screenshot for an example of several of those features.
Except for Web designers with fast Net connections, most users will find this an unusable site. After all, it's not like tech-beautiful Boo.com ended up with thousands of repeat customers giving the site lots of good word-of-mouth. If DrMartens.com actually tried to sell shoes (it doesn't, although the site never explicitly says so), I'd be astonished if it closed many sales at all.
But I should clarify one point. This review is not to downplay the talents of the designers who created DrMartens.com. To the contrary, I think the design team is immensely talented. In fact, one section of the site is one of the most engaging Flash applications I've seen recently. Click on the link to "our story," and you'll be treated to an engaging and creative cartoon history of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s... including Pac-Man and Elvis!
The problem is that these Flash apps -- the cartoon history and the site's slick flippy graphic elements -- are misplaced on DrMartens.com. Customers come to DrMartens for the shoes, not the bits. And putting flashy bits in the spotlight, instead of the shoes, misses the strategic customer experience: finding good info about the shoes.
Doc Martens is about shoes, not cartoons -- and the website should only serve that goal.
link to this column
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