For my review of an eCommerce website I decided to look at the Payless.com website.  Working there I look at the posters they use in the stores and judge the layout and design from the perspective of a graphic designer, and I thought why not do the same with their website.  Only in this instance I’d be looking at it from the perspective of whether or not they have a user friendly website that doesn’t make me think.

I have gone on the website often enough to see the new shoes that come out and come up with a sales pitch to tell customers, but after going back on and buying shoes myself I found myself thinking more than I really wanted to in just a few instances.

When you first open the site the first thing you notice is that they are having their BOGO sale, they have a few slides after that that show deals for women’s, mens’, and kids shoes.  If you scroll down there are links to designers, athletic shoes, and wide with shoes.  Seeing one of the slides had women’s flats on them I decided to go look at the flats and just clicked on the slide, which brought me to all the flats that they have and began to look for shoes that I like.  Above every shoe picture there was a little tag that said if the item was on sale, the tag was red, included in BOGO, the tag was an orange color, or if it was an “every day value” shoe, a green tag.   Trying to keep to the point of view as just a user I realized not everyone would know what “every day value” meant; I’d assume that because there was no BOGO tag that these were excluded from the deal but not be entirely sure.  If I wanted to narrow down my search for shoes I can choose the size, price, width, brand, and color by easily selecting from the categories on the left of the page.  Deciding that since it is still cold out I wanted to go look at boots.  Quickly glancing at the side where all the categories were there was no clear way to choose a different style of shoe beside clicking on the link “women” at the top and going from there.  I chose that and it took me to a page similar to the homepage but it had the categories underneath a slide show of deals and I chose the Boots category. I chose a riding boot just to see what the ordering looked like; it had a large picture of the item and underneath you could choose to see it in a different color and angle. On the right side of the page it had the brand name, name of the boot (I had chosen the Zoey Riding Boot) a rating of it, the sale and clearance tag with the old price in gray and new price in red.  The numbered steps for you, choosing the color first, then size, they even had a chart to view, next you chose the quality and then “add to bag” button in blue with white lettering that stood out on the entirely white background. I added this to my cart and since it was BOGO clicked back to look for more.  This is when I realized next to the category you were in there was an arrow button that if clicked, a menu of the women shoe categories would pop up and was easier to navigate by. After adding another pair to the cart I was ready to checkout and clicked on my cart in the top right corner and it brought me to my cart where it showed me the prices with BOGO applied and just had to choose shipping and put in my credit card.

Overall, there isn’t much color on payless.com, which I can see that it makes the shoes stand out, and for the most part it followed Steve Krug’s advice to not make me think with just a few small things in the way.