Re: [HWG] product pages tips

Roger,

I don't have any special tips for developing, but when you do your catalogue
pages analysis, try to think about how it will be when someone is using it.
Some kind of intelligent product finder is good if you can organise it - an
endless list of nodes to follow to get to the final item can be very
dispiriting. And try, if practicable, to have several similar things on the
same page to compare, not one per page.

(Imagine a shop where you walk in the front, to see 5 doors with, say, bird
seed, bird feeders, cage accessories etc written on each. You go though the
first one and see a small room with three more doors with nuts, grain, and
breadcrumbs. Choose the middle one and find more doors: oats, millet, wheat,
hemp. By this time you've decided that actually you want to find out about a
feeder first, so you have to back out though all the doors to the lobby
because you can't actually see the feeder rooms. That is a pretty exact
analogy for the way a web catalogue commonly works, but would be a disaster
in the real world, where browsing and rummaging is an important part of
successful purchasing.)

Lots of sites work on the strict hierarchy principle and generally I dislike
them. For some products, you can develop a good search form based on real
world needs - I like the memory finder at www.crucial.com which does a
really good job for that kind of site. Whether you can come up with the same
for bird stuff is another question, of course.

Lois Wakeman
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http://siteusability.com
http://communicationarts.co.uk
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