monthly reveiw 1:Thiswhyimbroke.com Vs Amazon by luke susko

January 20, 2013 at 2:14 pm · Filed under Monthly Review, Spring 2013 b

Thisiswhyimbroke.com vs Amazon by Luke Susko

Thisiswhyimbroke.com is site that features items that appeals to my demographic.
However does it make it easy to find something you are looking for.
Upon first entering the site you will see featured products flash across the screen
Some image and a search box on the left hand side. The first thing I found myself asking
Is why isn’t it at the top of the page it would be easier to find. It is also hard to tell if you can click on the categories at the top of page until you hover over them. Let’s try to search for something. Well I noticed there is no drop down box to separate the categories. When I clicked on one of the categories, the search completely disappears.
There is no clear way back to the main page where I was before other than the back button.
So now lets try actually searching for something. Let say I searching for a wallet.
This is an actual improvement. It shows me option to buy and actually has the search option to search still. However it seems that the site is more a link website for other sites that sell the actual products.
Despite that oversight, let’s compare this site to one that actually sells things professionally. Lets go with amazon.com. There are clear and concise differences between the two. First and foremost the search box allows the separation of categories.
I going to search for the same thing and use that drop box item and select clothing and accessories. I find this difference staggering, Amazon allows you to limit you results even further down by different things like company, and even price, even better there is a clear way back to page before.
When it comes down to it Amazon is better site for finding a general variety of items, wile thiswhyimbroke.com is for finding more unique items that may not be features on sites like Amazon. In the end Amazon makes it easier to find what you are looking for and make you think a lot less the Thiswhyimbroke.com

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Monthly Review #1 – Fab.com

January 18, 2013 at 6:00 pm · Filed under Monthly Review, Spring 2013 b

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.

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Eichenlaub Monthly Review #1

January 18, 2013 at 9:16 am · Filed under Monthly Review, Spring 2013 b

For this review, I decided to look at the Zappos Web site. Immediatly I looked for things that I could buy and place in my shopping cart. When I saw the site I admit I was a little curious at how it worked and which buttons took me to the places I wanted to go. When I focused at looking for the things I was interested in, I was able to sucessfully locate and add an object to my shopping cart. I had to do a little thinking, mainly because I don’t use these sitesvery often, but the site was able to show me what items were actual buttons, what items led to the categories I was interested in, and how easy it was to place my oder for shoes. Overall I didn’t need to think too much and I was able to do what I needed without having to retrace my steps.

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