For my first monthly review I decided to look at ThinkGeek.com. When I first visited the site, I thought that everything was fairly easy to find and to navigate through. I personally appreciated the visuals the site provided since most of the eCommerce sites are usually pretty dull and boring to look at. For me personally, that makes a site more difficult to navigate through because I get bored with it. Everything has a place on ThinkGeek.com. The name of the site is easy to see in the upper left-hand corner, the “hot items” are in the middle of the page where it scrolls through so the viewer can see them easily, the “shop-by-depatment” links run down the left hand side of the webpage and the search bar is located at the top. Because most other sites are set up like this it was easy to look through the site’s items and to search.
The navigation was also fairly simple. The accumulation of the links you click on show up in a bar above your current search which shows where you have been on the site (Home > Interests > Big Bang Theory >). I think this is a great feature for any site because if I want to go back a step or two it will tell me exactly where I was and direct me to the page I want to go. I had to think very little when using the site. I didn’t have to wonder if something was clickable or un-clickable; I could find where to look for things either in the search bar or among the categories along the left side; it wasn’t too busy that I wasn’t sure what I was looking at; I was able to move things to my cart easily; and there wasn’t a lot of text which made it easy to read and more engaging.
When adding items to my shopping cart it was very self explanatory. Some sites have you go though so many hoops just to complete an order. ThinkGeek.com was straightforward: once you add an item to your cart it takes you to the “purchase” screen where you can either enter your shipping address and credit card number, or you can continue shopping. If you continue to shop, the shopping cart remains in the upper right-hand corner and it tells you how many items that are in your cart and what your current bill is. It’s easy to get caught up in online shopping so I personally like this feature so I don’t go too overboard.
When looking at and navigating the site, it makes me realize how much work goes into making such a functional site. Just creating a home page, with plain text only was time consuming, and it makes you realize how much work and time goes into popular websites like ThinkGeek.com. If a website is not user-friendly or too confusing to look at, users will usually refer to another site that is better organized and can easily help them find what they want.