For my review, I chose to go on ThinkGeek, a website for the inner geek. I personally love the site. Has some great stuff at some awesome prices. I can never get enough of looking around that place. There is always something I want to impulse buy from there because everything is so cool that they sell.
Anyway, onwards with the review itself. When it comes to the overall appearance of the website, ThinkGeek has really outdone themselves.The colors are more on the dark and duller side, but their logo and the main interface that lists the items is lighter and brighter. There is some good contrast going on. It makes for some great appeal as well to attract consumers to come and shop. The font is easy to read and appears to be Arial. Even the small text is easy to read with the Arial font being used.
ThinkGeek itself is a pretty organized website overall. I decided I wanted to search for some Portal 2 merchandise, a hoodie or tee to be exact, because I am a huge Portal fan. At first, I thought it was a little difficult because you can shop by interest, but it doesn’t list every interest, and Portal was one that was not listed. In order to find it, it took extra thought to find the category closest to it. When I looked at the buttons and menus on the left hand side of the site, I kind of had a little bit of a thought overload because there are so many different little side menus and buttons and none seemed to be what I was looking for. Their buttons could be more simplified to make finding items easier.
As the book explains, buttons need to be more defined and simplified, otherwise it takes away from what we, the consumers, are trying to get accomplished and makes for some complex thought. This was what was starting to happen with me, so to avoid this, I went to the search bar and typed in Portal 2, pressed the Enter button, and away we go. The search bar itself is very good. It even pops up with a mini menu with items related to what you are searching for before you even press the Enter button using keywords you type in the box. I think that is very nifty. Also, when clicking one of the items listed in the mini search menu, it will take you directly to the page for that item. That is wonderful I must say. Takes little extra thought for me to search and click through pages of items to find exactly what I am looking for.
After finding a Portal 2 hoodie that has a turret on it, I clicked the ‘buy now’ and off to my shopping cart it went. Overall, the site makes it generally easy to find the item. However, if you do not know exactly what you are looking for, it can be a bit difficult to find the general range of items that you might be interested in. One might know he or she is looking for a t-shirt, but finding the t-shirt from the right category within apparel can be quite tedious and difficult in some cases. It can take some playing around to find where you need to go, but once you find it, you are good to go. The mini menu using keywords on the search bar is wonderful and an excellent pro to finding just what I want on the site. However, the buttons and sidebar menu can made it difficult if you do not know what category you want exactly because the item you are looking for may or may not be where you think it is.