Wednesday, July 13, 2005

customized design is good for e-tail

A company that sells outdoor equipment found that when people are shopping for kayaks, they are much more interested in performance data than when they shop for clothing, where they want information on popularity data. So on their web site, they have two different layouts. For equipment, they highlight the performance data. For clothing they highlight the popularity data. Simple human factors design - they draw attention to the information that has stronger connections in the customers' product-need schema. If target customers buy clothing to look cool, then their need is for cool clothes. So the site design needs to quickly steer them towards the relevant coolness factors.

Cookie cutter design does not work.