Christmas shopping still sucks
It's the one time of the year when I spend more than the normal amount of time on online shopping sites. And the same as every other year, it seems like major online retailers have learnt little about user's shopping habits.
One of the common horrors on sites such as debenhams.com is that that the designers seem to believe that people think in terms of brands, rather than categories of items - for example, I've visited the site thinking I'd like to buy a gift for an aunt - maybe something like bubble bath. Easy enough, right?
- Step one, visit the site.
- Step two, go to the beauty section.
- Step three, find the "Bath & Body" range.
- Step four... Select a brand. Huh?
The flaw here is that I can't just browse all the items in the "Bath & Body" section - I have to pick a brand to continue. So now, I need to select a brand and browse through those items; if I don't like what I see, I have to go back, choose another and keep going. Often in these cases I don't even know the brands or have any suggestion of what sort of items that that brand covers - forcing me to navigate continually into areas that I probably don't care about.
Unfortunately for the end user, product managers think in brands whereas most consumers - with perhaps the exception of some high fashion items - tend not to, particularly if they're just trying browse and virtually "window shop" for ideas.