I think we’ve all come to terms with the fact that the web is full of awful looking pages. In fact, I think most of us will agree that most the pages out there are in fact terrible. This isn’t surprising of course, as the web was designed to let everyone in, and I’m sure if we could inspect everyone’s room most wouldn’t exactly be up to par with the latest interior design trends either. However, I’ve recently been encountering an interesting phenomenon, one that I thought died out with the 90’s: those that qualify themselves as the design elite in the physical world actually inhabit the bottom rung when it comes to the web. I’m speaking of course of clothing designers. That’s right, the same people that stick their noses up at you for not wearing such-and-such® brand jeans are completely incapable of making a decent web page. It’s as if they’re getting the same child laborers that stitch together their clothing in Malaysia for 2 cents an hour to make their web pages. But at least then they’ed have an excuse! But no, these are obviously EXPENSIVE designs. They reek of too much money spent. As I mentioned earlier, this was an embarrassing trend of the mid-90s, when even technology juggernauts cared more about how much Flash was on their pages than how easy it was to actually *purchase* something. Now, whenever I reach a web site that is just completely disgusting in design, I usually fire them an email and forget about it, but one site in particular really just stood out for me this week: lacoste.com (notice how I put their URL on here but went out of my way to not actually link them, consider this a favor).
Let’s take a look at how this beast manages to fall apart completely, and hopefully learn something in the process. I hinted to the first no-no above: Flash. I think this dead horse has been beaten enough, but to reiterate: no way to go back, unnecessary need for plugins, too much loading, and of course, no way to save a link to anywhere. So unless you’re writing some sort of app or game, don’t use it.
Now this one still amazes me. When you initially enter their website, your browser window is expanded to full screen. First off, you shouldn’t be messing around with a user’s window like that, because now every new window I open will be ridiculously large. It’s just rude. Your website should be designed to fit whatever space you have. Of course, this is a little difficult when you’re using Flash (see above). But fine, you have a BIG page, you want to make sure I get the FULL experience. Alright. So what could possibly require this much space? FULL SIZE images of their clothing? FULL SCREEN movies of people using their products? No: a 950×695 Flash widget. Now, if you know the thing is 950×695, why are you making the window full screen? Is all that beige surrounding it just essential to the marketing? Or are the people working on this using 8 year old monitors where 950×695 really does need to be full screened? And now, for your viewing pleasure, a graphical analysis:
Moving on after this initial disaster, we now attempt to find a desired item of clothing. The logical thing to do would be to provide a spotlight-inspired instant search. I might type “men’s”, “pants”, and “spring” and start seeing some serious results start to pop up. I could then click some columns and organize as I saw fit. But this of course would be too easy, and not artsy at all! So instead, we are presented with a number of hierarchal menus. Want to see ALL pants at once? Too bad, you have to see things in the order they want you to see things. I can’t complain too much in this department I suppose since it’s something that very few people have figured out, so this isn’t something I can say is uniquely terrible to this web site. However, once we get to the clothing, we do see something… “novel”. Most sites let you see the clothes. Lacoste seems to think it’s much more important to show you the models however. Now, if I was trying to buy the people in these photos this would be great, but I’m trying to buy that pair of pants that homie is wearing there. Clicking on the clothing on the people doesn’t improve things either, you are just now presented with a bunch of ugly text. That’s right, you don’t get to see the front and back of t-shirts or anything crazy like that, just a somewhat technical description and a bunch of serial numbers for the item. So basically, all you get to see is how that particular pair of pants or t-shirt looks like when you’re jumping up and down, and that’s it. The rest is left up to the imagination:
All this, coupled with annoying background music was just too much for this soul.
