Is making your customers experience as painless as possible.
Sounds easy? It should be, yet so many sites get it so wrong.
I’m going to pick on a company called Scan, they sell computer hardware and related items and we occasionally buy components off them for our business.
Over the past two days I’ve had two similar bad experiences, both exactly the same but for different orders, combined with the fact that I’ve never liked their site I thought I needed to vent (constructively of course!).
Overall their site design is okay, they have a very busy homepage but you can quickly tell what type of items they sell. I’m sure most visitors want to see component options and prices so the top category menu probably works quite well for them.
In my eyes though they have some fundamental problems:
1. Product Navigation & Display
Although I think the expanded horizontal top navigation is a good starting point, once you select an option you get a pop out window from which you have to then tick the subcategories that you want to view.
I don’t like having to make this selection upfront, I don’t like the tick boxes and often there seems to be little difference in some of subcategory descriptions making selection something you have to really consider.
When you get to a product listing page the initial screens are full of adverts, text or links to learn more about the components, meaning products are pushed right down towards the bottom of the page. Read More
