I like watching others use web pages to do constructive tasks to see what they consider an out of box experience to be. It is also interesting to see where the webdesign forces them to struggle. I was curiously watching my partner navigate her way through the J Crew website recently. It is a standard shopping interface limited by the normalisation choices of the database designers. Brian Goetz wrote on introducing an article on java threading:

Languages, libraries, and frameworks shape the way we write programs. Even though Alonzo Church showed in 1934 that all the known computational frameworks were equivalent in the set of programs they could represent, the set of programs that real programmers actually write is shaped by the idioms that the programming model driven by languages, libraries, and frameworks makes easy to express.

My partner found the J Crew website frustrating as the database normalisation choices were not the same as what she wanted to sort on and left her with too many results. The interesting part here is that the database, which is normally the first thing designed and then set in stone, limited how the store front could work.

This is the desklight from conof. I don't see anywhere on their website to buy it. If you are in the business of selling products and someone hits your site, interested in your product, "buy it here" is the logical link to present the user with.

The same with the Nikon camera on this website. I clicked through to Amazon as I am interested in a camera that can handle dim light better than my current one. I wanted to know how expensive it was, but under price there is the line, "To see our price, add this item to your cart. You can always remove it later. Why don't we show the price?" I was interested enough to put it into the cart, after I whinged about it first, and for those interested it was $1,400 or so. I don't see why I had to put it in my cart to see how expensive it was. And for FWIW I didn't read their explanation as to why, I don't care enough.

Some more incongruities. If the free market is supposed to aid in price transparency, the most opaque industry I have come across is the US health care system. Prior to the operation on my shoulder I could not get a price out of anyone. I was told numerous times about the 90:10 and 70:30 for out/in coverage. It was also made clear that the Doctor, Anaethesiologist and Medical Center would all bill me independently. But I could not get dollar amounts. The bills trickled in and it wasn't that much, but still I would have liked to have known my liabilities before hand. I was in enough pain however that I would have paid a lot more to have it go away.

Zappos has a popular retail shoe website, their main tagline is that shipping back and forth is free. However their website makes the size of the shoe image and all the text that goes with it the equally large (or small more accurately).

Customers do not care about if it is new, what the SKU is, or what the type of shoe is; they want to see the shoe itself and the price. Too often web developers, software engineers, and database designers let data leak to the customer that the customer could not give a rats ass about. Worse, that unnecessary data takes up valuable space that could be used with a larger and more eye catching image of the product.

Target and Safeway have the same issues; enough that the image is too small to determine what you are buying. Victoria's secrets has the right idea and posts a very large picture of the dress on the main search page.