don’t break it if it ain’t broken
31 December 2005, 11:39 amMy bank*’s website and the Shaw’s supermarket in our neighborhood have both been undergoing sweeping redesigns.
The common denominator is that both broke designs that weren’t broken (at least from a customer perspective).
The Bank
The bank’s former website was ugly by the standards of the modern web, but its interface was solid — clearly organized, and straightforward to navigate. I also never saw it produce an inexplicable error message. (I wish I’d had the foresight to make screen captures of the original version so I could do a before-and-after piece.) The new version is — of course — prettier. It’s also so much worse from a usability perspective that I can’t believe they put it in front of any actual banking customers before they launched it. Just the log-in screen is thoroughly cringe-inducing:
Even in the thumbnail, you can easily see there’s way too much text. If you look at the full-size version (click the thumbnail) there are more usability horrors, including, but not limited to:
- Old password trashed and woefully insecure new default assigned
- Old user preferences trashed without warning
- Site breaks the browser back button
- Bank’s name doesn’t appear in page title or header
- Uninformative link text (”clicking here”)
- Poor support for customers with visual or motor impairments
- Redundant text (”must be between 6 and 14 characters”)
- Inconsistent language and Meaningless Capitalization for site features
Once you log in, it only gets worse.
From the bank’s perspective, it’s a no-win situation at this point. They’ve already done the data migration, so they probably can’t roll back, no matter how much users demand it. They can — and should — improve the messaging on individual pages, but changes to site workflow, and global feautres like enabling the browser back button may be prohibitively expensive.
If they’d only done a little usability testing on the proposed re-design they could have avoided this debacle.
The Supermarket
First, I understand that supermarkets don’t want to maximize usability. Staples like milk are shelved at the back, so customers are forced to walk the length of the store and maximize their exposure to high-margin impulse buys.
Second, Shaw’s pre-organization layout was more than a little weird: different brands of olives, for example, were shelved in a crunchy yuppie aisle, the international aisle, with pickles, and with other condiment-y things. Some nuts were with baking supplies and some were with snacks.
That said, the reorganization is just bizarre. It hasn’t (so far) addressed the which-aisle confusion. Backward-to-forward orderings of some aisles have been reversed (some of the bulky/heavy laundry and pet supplies must now be carried/wheeled the whole length of the aisle). The two crunchy yuppie aisles have been shuffled. The produce that’s not in the crispers is in a new and equally arbitrary configuration. The flower counter is now positioned for maximum confusion with the customer service desk. The actual customer service desk is remarkably hard to find.
These changes have been accompanied by aisles jammed with boxes, erratic re-stocking of items, and hordes of confused shoppers milling around uncertainly. I know how razor-thin supermarket margins are, and I assume this Shaw’s had a disastrous year end. I know they drove me to less convenient and more expensive alternatives many times during the past two months.
And I can’t — for the life of me — see any conceivable benefit. (They did close off one exit, which simplifies store security requirements, but they could have easily done that without changing everything else.)
Except for rules like dairy-at-the-back and cold-food-in-cold-aisles, any super market organization scheme is fundamentally arbitrary. I don’t think there’s much point to standardizing them between stores, because I think most people shop at a limited number of super markets, and eventually internalize the layouts of those specific stores. I don’t have market research data to back this up, but based on anecdotal experience, I suspect most people visit no more than one or two of the same supermarket brand — it’s not so much a question of which of these four Shaw’s stores am I going to as of is this a trip to Shaw’s, Stop’n'Shop, or Market Basket. And once customers have figured out things like where the heck the shallots are squirelled away, it’s almost cruel to change them.
Update 8 Jan 2006:
The danged shallots moved again, but at this point I have to concede that the end state of the re-ordering may allow for a greater variety of stock and arguably may be more logical. The new position of the hummus cold-case makes more more sense, for example.
Editrix found a copy of the muddily photocopied flier referred to in the comments below, and I’m pleased to share this monolith of questionable information architecture (PDF, 60K) with y’all.
* I won’t mention the bank by name; I’m still happy to have a locally-owned bank with a commitment to social responsibility, and the problems with the website aren’t — quite — bad enough that I wouldn’t recommend the bank overall.
These changes have been accompanied by aisles jammed with boxes, erratic re-stocking of items, and hordes of confused shoppers milling around uncertainly.
A couple of weeks ago, Shaw’s had a cashier stationed by the entrance handing out muddily Xeroxed flyers, dense with text, to help confused shoppers find the new locations for the items on their lists. The first time she offered me one, I declined it, but the next time I was in, I took one. Not that it helped much — it wasn’t broken down into any groupings, so it took longer to scan it and figure out which was “Aisle 8″ than it did to wander back and forth. The weird thing is, they were still in the mid-stages of renovations and reorganization. I guess it was a sop to people who’d complained that they couldn’t find anything.
It’s funny how ingrained the layout of the old Stah Mahket is. I still order shopping lists based on the configuration I remember, as things are so in flux that I haven’t mapped what’s where yet.
Also, the second entrance has been randomly drywalled off, then opened, then closed again in the past month — with no signs as to its current state of viability. Argh!
Love the default password thing on the bank site - that would really not instill confidence in me towards the bank’s security.
I have a grocery checklist that I print out and take with me to the local Safeway every time I go, after going through the pantry and checking off the things I need. It was a somewhat laborious process to create the list in the first place, as it is organized by aisle and has everything listed on it in that aisle that I regularly buy. I remember making it by taking a pen and paper with me to the store and writing down the aisle numbers with some notes. At that point, I pretty much had the store layout memorized anyway and was able to make most of the list at home from the aisle numbers and notes.
So, a couple of years later they completely changed the store layout, of course. I had to quickly make a new list without the benefit of having lived with the new layout for years. I probably looked liked a stock boy, walking up and down the aisles writing down aisle numbers next to all the items in the old list. Does that make me too anal?
I got to enjoy the Shaw’s “redesign” while doing mega shopping (my biggest grocery trips of the year) for our holiday party. Nevermind that I had accidentally taken my morning dose of pills twice that day by accident and then lost my carefully prepared shopping list midway through filling my cart… The charming staff (some of the staff there might be charming, but the folks moving the products from one aisle to another that day were not) were griping and half of the bread was in one aisle while its sisters and brothers were in another three or four aisles away. I ended up having to check out, go home, recreate the rest of my shopping list, and return for more fun with Shaw’s and Co.
Our local Big Grocery (as opposed to our newly opened branch of our food co-op), which we use for certain boring staples like my diet soda addiction, toilet paper, and a few other items, built a new building for itself last year (the old one was demolished to make way for a Home Depot, not quite open yet). It took me forever to find my way around the new store, and there are still some things whose location I’m unfamiliar with. There’s one particularly odd section: a couple of rows with non-food items and seasonal merch that’s U-shaped and essentially walled off from the rest of the store, in that you can enter its aisles only from one end of the store (the rear, in fact). I completely don’t understand why they’d reduce access like that…especially for someone like me, who learned the layout of the old store (and the new) by using the shopping technique of having a list and going up and down every aisle, finding stuff I needed, until I learned where things are. But I never go into the U-section - because I can’t go *through* it.
Anyway, your mention of the oddities of layout reminded me of an amusing fact of the old store: salsa, for some unknown reason, was found in at least six different locations in the store. I can’t quite remember what all they were, but it was very strange indeed!