Whenever I use the Internet, ending up on online shopping sites is one thing I can rarely avoid. Although I almost never end up making a purchase, I can’t help but be constantly searching various clothing and jewelry websites. At any given time my laptop will have at least five tabs open with different sites pulled up with items perpetually waiting in my cart. (Right now I have three different windows with seventeen different tabs, featuring all different fashion sites.)
The site I chose to look at for this review is one I frequent often called baublebar.com. Bauble Bar is a jewelry website that I happened upon by accident. The site stood out to me from the start because of its clean, chic design. The site itself uses minimal colors for its background and wording as to not distract from their usually colorful products. Aside from the black bar at the top with white lettering, the background is white and the letting is black. They add some color in the bright turquoise, greenish yellow, and fuchsia details such as the many links that only show the colors when you hover your mouse over them. Their typefaces are clean and modern and make the whole site appear very professional and classy.  Aside from the site’s appearance that I was obviously taken by, I hadn’t thought too much about the way it was designed in the way I do now after reading the first part of “Don’t Make Me Think.”
To test if Bauble Bar required me to think while shopping, I pulled up the site and decided to look for a statement necklace to pretend to purchase. As soon as the site loaded, I instantly could see the menu bar featuring the list of different types of jewelry. I hovered my mouse over the ‘necklaces’ tab and a large drop down box popped up featuring the names of different types of necklaces along with photos of two seemingly random ones. I easily found the statement necklace option that turned fuchsia when I hovered over it and alerted me that it was obviously a link. Once I clicked on it, their large selection of statement necklaces appeared. Most were pictures of the necklaces on the plain white background that switched to a photo of the same necklace being worn by a model when I hovered over them. I liked that feature because I didn’t have to actually click on each necklace and go to a new page just to see what they would look like on someone. I decided to pick a pretty necklace that was on sale and clicked on the picture to take me to the product page. Once there, it was very easy to find the ‘add to bag’ button along with color and quantity options. They also had expanding information on the description, size and materials, and delivery and returns. Once I picked my color and pressed ‘add to bag,’ a drop down menu showing what was in my cart appeared in the top right corner of the page stemming from the ‘shopping bag’ link in the top black menu bar. It only stayed for a couple seconds before disappearing though, which was slightly confusing since I only wanted the one item. I can imagine it being a good aspect if I had been wanting to just continue shopping without having to press the back button a bunch of times like on many other sites I frequent though. To proceed with the order, I clicked on the ‘shopping bag’ link and this time it took me to a new page with the checkout ability. I stopped there before I could spend $20.
Overall, I found the shopping experience on baublebar.com fairly simple. The design made it quick and easy to find what I was looking for. Nothing was too crowded and I didn’t really have to think very much at all. A good design like that makes it fun to fill up my cart with stylish items I really can’t afford to be buying.

-Emily Brosko