I chose to review Fab.com. It is primarily a home and apparel shopping site. At a first glance, the categories listed along the second navigation bar at the top are pretty basic but could definitely be improved and may present challenges for people unfamiliar with some of the lingo. They’d definitely require plenty of people to think. For example the Vintage and Young@Heart categories – “vintage” is largely a matter of opinion and it’s hard to know whether it’s the right place to look for what you want or not, and upon the first time visiting the website, there is no way I would know what Young@Heart is supposed to be or refer to and whether it is a section I want to be in. The dropdown display being triggered by hovering over the categories helps with that problem – which presents itself somewhat with even Furniture, Home, Pets, and Gifts & Gadgets – by showing the subcategories. But, even many of the subcategories take a bit of thought – like “Foodie” and “Tabletop” under Kitchen, “Pendant” under Lighting, and “Makes You Smile” under Gifts & Gadgets.

The first navigation bar at the top is originally made up of 7 buttons (as the Fab and a section that mentions free shipping on orders above $75 are not obviously buttons, but turned out to be), a search bar, and a login button. I like the use of the New and Sale buttons to help visitors find the newest products and the current deals. I’m personally not a fan of the live feed feature, the third button. It keeps track, second by second, of what other users are buying, liking, and sharing, but mostly just because it seems extraneous and you don’t really get what it is until you click the button. The same applies to the Calendar and Smile buttons – the Smile button turned out to just take me to a sort of informational page about Fab, which included a bunch of blog posts and was kind of oversized and overwhelming to me, but it did have a sectional navigation bar at the top that helped.

The search bar is a bit of a special case – when selected, it changes the other buttons of the top navigation bar into buttons to search by Price, Color, and Category. I like that to search by color they have swatches of the colors rather than just words, but my positive comments about searching end with that. The price ranges are huge, starting with $1-49.99, but widening as the prices increase ($50-99.99, $100-199.99, $200-499.99, $500-999.99, then $1000+) – this is somewhat understandable, because the prices on this website go very very high on some items, and if the ranges were made smaller the list of price ranges would be significantly longer, but it’s a negative feature to me. It is also a negative that these buttons can’t seem to be used in combination, but that is helped by the ability to narrow by color and sort by price in the product display area. The real issue I find is with the search bar itself – as far as I can tell, it will not allow you to simply carry out a keyword search – it displays a short list of suggested results as you type and you can only choose from those. So, if you don’t have a specific name of a product or category in mind, the search is wholly unhelpful – nearly useless.

The homepage is laid out nicely, with a “Featured Today” section at the top with left and right arrows to cycle through them. Under that is a continually scrolling row of popular products (based on like, shares, and buys), then a little lower a collection of New Arrivals, then the same for Ending Soon. Like the Smile page I mentioned before, this one is long, oversized, and overwhelming, but this time does not have the helpful navigation links at the top.

A couple technical notes: When the browser window size is adjusted, an issue arises with the navigation bars – the side-to-side scroll bar only applies to the product area of the page, so the content on either side of the navigation bars is cut off and there’s no way to get to it without re-expanding the window. Also, product browsing (scrolling down through products) operates on an automatic “show more” system rather than a page-by-page systems – when you scroll to the bottom of the shown products, the next products load underneath, pretty much making the page longer and longer. I am not a fan of this system in the first place – I prefer page by page – and it is flawed on this website. If scrolling by dragging the scroll bar, you’ll jump down several rows of products when it loads more and have to scroll back up to browse from where you left off – this can be avoided by using the down arrow key or down arrow button on the scroll bar, but it is a frustrating flaw to a user who likes the bar-dragging method.

The “show more” system, along with the large display size of the products (probably at least 4x bigger than product displays on most other shopping websites I’ve been on), which means the list takes up more space, makes scrolling through products a long and tedious process and also makes scrolling back up through to find something that caught your eye previously not worth the effort.

Now, finally, I come to the actual process of putting a product I’ve found (in any of the frustrating ways possible) in the shopping cart. Upon hovering over a product I like, a Buy It button appears. I click it and am told I need to log in to buy. Well, that’s a little bothersome, but many shopping websites make you create an account anymore. I’ll just log in with Facebook – that’s nice and easy. Aw, but it took me back to the top of the page – now I have to scroll back down to find the product. Ah, there it is. Okay, so, click the Buy Now button and there it is in the shopping cart – great. Click on the cart button and it takes me to the page – shows me what I’m getting, quantities and prices, estimated arrival periods, all very good. Click on checkout, and it’s all pretty basic – credit card or Paypal, billing address, shipping address, all the usuals.

There were technical issues, frustrating navigational flaws, and stylistic choices (the large product displays) that are ultimately a hindrance to the user. This is a site that you can run into walls navigating, but it does a good job of promoting certain products – best sellers, new arrivals, etc. And I will say that, as annoying as it is to try to find things, it’s very simple to buy them, other than having to log in to an account.