Ask HN: What is wrong with our UX?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5594500

by brd • 13 years ago

5 18 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We've created a simple tool for discovering gift ideas and its flopped horribly. I plan on doing some direct observations over the next few days but would love to hear some feedback from HNers.

Site is: http://www.giftwell.com/discover/

brd6• 13 years ago

Clickable link: http://www.giftwell.com/discover/

We've seen ok numbers of "more suggestions" but we've seen virtually no users "star" gifts. Our tool gets smarter as you star gifts and it will get smarter with use but with no interaction the tool is hosed.

We intentionally went with a very tame, vanilla UI because we figured it would convert better with the average online user. We've got a few ideas for more radical user experiences but I was hoping to hear some additional opinions on why this fails so hard before venturing down another dead-end.

Thanks in advance!

mflindell• 13 years ago

For starters, you're using the font awesome gift icon. Theres not really much thought in the UX at all. Invest a few hundred dollars in a 99 designs contest and you might be able to remove the bootstrap stigma and stop your website looking like an administrative panel

brd6• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, harsh but totally fair.

Like I said, we tried to keep it as vanilla as possible to cultivate a sense of familiarity. We actually did look into getting a better logo but have yet to see a designer produce something we like better than the basic font-awesome gift. We genuinely want something we could eventually trademark but we're not going to rush into something just because its not a stock image.

As far as the bootstrap stigma, I may be mistaken but from my experience it seems to only exist in technical circles.

DanBC• 13 years ago

I clicky the link.

I see a nice, clean, site. I wouldn't have chosen that orange with that blue, but it's not hideous. I clicky [FATHERS DAY] and next question.

It says "Coming soon, sign up to get notified", and I can go no further.

So, this is something that I would be interested in. I don't care if you use skim links and affiliate links. I really do want to find gifts for people and would welcome some kind of service that helps me discover stuff. But I'm not going to sign up until I've been able to see something.

Good Luck though!

EDIT: I clicky the browse all products link. There's a nice selection. I can see how it could be expanded to a huge range and provide really great suggestions.

I dislike the bold of the font - the bold white on grey doesn't look nice in my browser. (Chrome on Windows Vista).

I usually browse with a narrow window. Doing this makes the pop up happen in a weird place. here's a screen shot. (http://imgur.com/PIEkFai)

I don't mean to be negative, I mean to be constructive, but sometimes I have problems with tone.

It looks like a good site!

brd6• 13 years ago

We curate the initial set of gifts, the father's day set isn't quite done yet but will be in the next few days. Thanks for the feedback!

edit: Fixed that popup. We rushed to rip out some bootstrap transition code recently, missed that media query.

And I didn't consider your tone negative at all, the feedback is much appreciated.

duiker101• 13 years ago

I don't suppose this is meant to happen and might be that you are getting some unexpected traffic or else but there is something a little off...

http://i.imgur.com/PXKfrAQ.png

Happens on Chrome and Firefox latest on Win 7. And Chrome on android, on different connections so I think it's something on your side, the page actually load fast enough but it's rendered like that.

doylemc• 13 years ago

My thoughts:

The colours don't work for me. Changing the blue on the title bar may help, make it darker. Have you ever used Adobe Kuler?

The Green colour doesn't add anything

The search placeholder text is not centered (vertically) and spoils the flow when reading from left to right

Try and get your font sizes consistent.

Make the margins of the title bar consistent with the in-page gifts.

Centre the login/password boxes

On Find the Perfect Gift, all the options are buttons making me think that when I click them, I'll move onto the next section.

I like the wizard aspect, just needs to be improved. Perhaps the title bar should appear once the wizard has been completed, or cancelled, so my eyes are not all over the place on first visit.

Try improving how the bookmarklet works.

When I click 'Save It' a new tab opens (in Chrome) and prompts me for my username and password. How about an in-page popup instead?

One for the future, how about some localization? I'm in the UK and want to buy things off Amazon.co.uk.

Good luck with it!

brd6• 13 years ago

Wow, thanks for the thorough review!

Excellent points about the title bar, will look into making those changes.

Our font choices definitely need to be revisited and made more consistent.

I absolutely see your point about the buttons/coloring. Its setup that way to eventually allow multiple options but I will make sure it has more of a checkbox feel moving forward.

The entire bookmarklet process definitely needs work. We rolled out the site as a simple gift bookmarklet originally and came to the conclusion the average person has zero interest in bookmarklets. For the time being we've sidelined out efforts to make that experience more pleasant.

We moved away from modals, for now, because of issues with mobile. We plan on eventually incorporating them everywhere but at this point we're more concerned about interaction with the wizard/browse than we are less frequent activities like login and contact.

Funnily enough, we're still not seeing anyone actually press the "star" on gifts in the wizard so clearly there is something about such a passive (and from the users perspective unnecessary) interaction that fails miserably. At this point its clear we'll need to do a major overhaul of the wizard itself which was the thing I was most concerned about when posting this.

stevejalim• 13 years ago

Don't break the back button. Like DanBC hit the annoying 'Coming soon' dead end, but couldn't go back to browse all. You may not use the back button, but enough newcomers exploring your site will. Even more so when you brick-wall them with a signup box.

brd6• 13 years ago

Woah, great point. I'm amazed that we never realized how terrible the back button experience is for the discovery process. Definitely something that needs immediately attention.

I'm really disappointed in that miss since we put in effort to use the history api to make the back button more pleasant for modals.

acesubido• 13 years ago

First thoughts:

As a visitor, there's a lack of focus of what you want me to do here.

The "Find the perfect gift" wizard seems to be overpowered by that toolbar. Do you want me to sign up? Do I need to know "About"? Do you want me to "Add a gift"? What am I suppose to do? Search? Do I really want to "search" or "browse"? How does it "work"? Is it the main thing you offer? If it's the main thing, I guess it would do best to emphasize it by putting it as a big search bar on the center.

1) Rethink that toolbar, go easy on it. Just a tip: It'd do best to put the "About" section at the footer.

2) Focus on what you want your visitor to accomplish. Emphasize on that, remove focus on everything else. Make it easy on them, consumer-type visitors have short attention spans. Respect that 10 second hold you have on them by making it easy to expose your main feature to them.

3) All advice are just 'words' unless it's tested. You can hold to the truth that any advice given are currently considered worse than your current assumption, given that your assumption is on the server and being tested by people while advice is just on a persons head.

brd6• 13 years ago

Thank you. I think hiding the toolbar with a small "show navbar" button will be far more appropriate for us moving forward. We knew it could be a bit of distracting but after the feedback we've gotten its clearly something to be fixed.

isleyaardvark• 13 years ago

When I look for Mother's Day gift ideas for "An Awesome Mom" or "Wine Lover", nothing happens in Chrome 26 on Mountain Lion, just FYI.

powatom• 13 years ago

Your website feels clunky and confusing.

Why can I click 'Next Question' before I've actually chosen an answer?

Why are you telling me that something is 'coming soon' after displaying its intro question so prominently?

Why is 'coming soon' a button?

Your default user experience is broken: I can't actually do anything using the prominently displayed buttons / suggested workflow. I don't know what this thing is until I click the 'Browse' button.

Additionally, in another comment you mention that saving an item is important for your analysis / feedback mechanisms. Why, then, am I only invited to save something if I hover over it? Suggest the potential interaction to me, don't force me to discover it.

In general your website isn't all that well designed. It screams bootstrap, and the 'familiarality' excuse is just that - an excuse. It doesn't feel familiar, because I don't know what your service is. It just feels confusing and unexciting.

mnicole• 13 years ago

At the homepage I'm presented with two options that are not relevant to me, and I have to strain my eyes a bit to find the alternative link (light blue on a very saturated cream) that just dumps me on a page full of everything. Too overwhelming.

What if instead of assuming the user is there for two reasons or no reason at all, give them a list of potential options. I'd assume most people going to the site are doing so for birthdays, so being able to sort by age, gender or interest is relevant right off the bat. I can't ever find the site that I felt did this best.. I want to say it was called "Wanttts"/"Wanted" or something.

As far as that initial selection is concerned, if you decide to keep it, I should only need to click once on my option to have the filter activated instead of clicking once on the option and clicking a second time to submit that option. I'm now two clicks into Father's Day and there are zero options for me, and I can't click my back button.

As a normal user, I'd be frustrated enough with the site at this point to leave it and go to Amazon.

Now clicking into Mother's Day gifts, I'm presented with radio options, despite the fact that my mother could be all of those things. I click on Stylish & Whimsical (which honestly doesn't even make sense for these two to be paired together) and get a list of 5 items that are neither stylish nor whimsical (a knife, a bland sweater, a set of wooden coasters, a rainbow headwrap and some wine glass lamps). In fact, my mom would probably roll her eyes at all of those. They are simply not thoughtful gifts.

As a normal user, I'd probably be done with the site at this point.

The star on each image is way too big and insinuates I'd be favoriting the item for later rather than adding it to my shopping cart. I didn't even read the text above it because I thought it was a page title (as it's an H3), not instructions on how to use the site.

So let's say my mom is equally silly and into knives, so I click the star on the knife in hopes that I'll see other gifts like it. No, instead I'm on a screen that tells me the price of the knife and would I like to add it to my cart. I click back because I'm not sure what that page was all about and I'm taken all the way back to the homepage where I'm being told to start all over again.

As a normal user, I'd definitely be done with the site at this point.

Okay, let's try this again.

I go through the exact same process, clicking the exact same options.. and I get different results? Where were all these options before? Five random options is just not enough for me to feel your site is effectively helping me choose something personalized. Again, under Stylish & Whimsical, I see items that are neither (perfume, cheap-looking bookstand, tacky seedboxes, a Samurai umbrella (what?) and a wire cage shaped like a barrel for corks).

Having the notification show up on the "View Gifts" button is the reason I clicked on it before, because I assumed that was the next action, even though the header tells me to click on the star to show more options. Progressive actions should be on the right side, stagnating/reverse options should be on the left. Likewise, the only time a button should be orange or red (unless it's notably thematic across the site) is when it is a negative action. A shopping cart view in particular should be in the top/primary navigation.

In continually clicking through the suggestions, I'm not finding anything that makes me think that the initial category I selected at the beginning has anything to do with the gifts I'm being shown, nor does it look to be actively filtering based on additional things I keep starring. And as noted before, all of these gifts are pretty bad/cheap-looking.

- - -

TL;DR

- The design needs a lot of work (the palette, the UX) and it should be a lot easier to navigate and understand what is going on. As others have mentioned, taking control of the back button is a terrible idea.

- The items you have aren't thoughtful/curated enough and the photography is weak (not that you can help it necessarily, but a better design would lessen how much it affects the overall appearance and I'd imagine that the more luxury the brand, the better the photos). When I'm looking for gifts using services like this, I'm doing it because I want to find unique items; probably gifts that cost a little extra to begin with. The items on your site are all things I could find on Amazon within a few clicks. If I wanted ThinkGeek-quality gifts, I'd go to Spencer's.

- Have users search by more specific keywords/interests instead of trying to lump people into categories they either don't fit into at all or that multiple could apply to.

There are a lot of gift-searching sites out there, and a lot of them have these same issues. What problem were you trying to solve with site? Why would people use a specialty service to find the same types of things that show up on Google Shopping or incentivized Bing Shopping searches? I guess I don't understand why already-popular vendors are listed at all. Gift-finding services should be about highlighting unique gifts that are handmade or crafted by specialists, curated by tastemakers. You don't need to advertise for Nordstrom's.

kohanz• 13 years ago

How do you know your UX is the reason that the site "flopped horribly"?

mcintyre1994• 13 years ago

As others have, I'll drop in some thoughts. Sorry if they're repeats! No particular order.

First, the focus on mother/father's day doesn't really seem sensible. I'll assume it's what your initial products focus on, but I definitely wouldn't keep it. My guess is it's designed primarily to separate male and female - doing so with gender options, and then drilling down into personality options would seem to make a lot more sense.

I can understand that your app doesn't support the back button - but your UI needs to solve that problem for the user. Done shopping for mum and want to shop for dad? (Doesn't apply to mother's/father's day, but birthdays?) Refresh the page and start again.

An obvious issue is that father's day isn't supported. Fair enough that there's no personality filters, but looking briefly through all the items available, there are some clearly for men (Personalized Man Cave Doormats was on the first page). Why not show them?

Okay, so selecting mother's day instead, I can see why that's supported first since it's mother's day in America soon? Anyway, the options probably shouldn't be radio - mum could easily be awesome and a wine lover. The family gardener could easily imply outdoorsy. The hostess could easily imply wine lover. No need to model such connections, but let users select more than one.

The more serious issue is that the buttons don't work. Ubuntu Firefox 20.0, - Click mother's day, next question - Click 'An awesome mom' (all other buttons work fine), get gift suggestions Firebug info: POST: http://www.giftwell.com/discover/ Result: Internal server error. On your website, there's no result and I'm left assuming that button is broken. GET: http://api.mixpanel.com/track/?data=<snip>&ip=1&... Result: 1 (appears to be the same as successful requests) -- - Click any radio option button, get gift suggestions No POST request made http://api.mixpanel.com/track/?data=<snip>&ip=1&... Result: 1 (same as above) -- - Now, as a user I am left assuming that your form simply doesn't function. No button will work any more.

--------------------

Okay, so that's a bug, but it completely breaks the UX on what seems to be the primary user experience right now.

So going into mother's day, selecting a working button (wine lover), I get only 5 results. There's tonnes of space below, but no more results shown. I click show more results, and I get 5 more. How come these weren't shown before? If there's somewhere infinite scrolling should be used, it's here. Fix that view gifts button somewhere and just show me everything relevant.

Or, maybe don't. Right now the results simply aren't relevant. They change every time I visit the page from the same options, but one time I got a sun towel and then 4 wine products. The next time I got watches, succulents (never heard of these, from the picture china plantpots?) and 2 wine products. The filters definitely need work.

When I saw them succulents, I thought I'd click to see what they were. Fortunately, that opened a modal with a picture and some information. Unfortunately, when it was fully loaded it scrolled so I could only see the top (as much as fitted on my screen). I couldn't move the scrollbar in Firefox for some reason, and the modal didn't have a scrollbar. In short, I could see a bigger version of the picture, and knew some text was there because I saw it loading, but it's unusable.

When I closed the modal, I tried again. No luck, it just didn't open this time. There's a problem with your Javascript - I can only open one modal per visit.

In the no thanks, show me everything menu, I get, well, everything. There's no filters and no sorting. It's also a different experience, there's no consistency. This time there's no weird thing in the top right corner of every image (what is that by the way, it didn't do anything?), and there's a buy/save button when I hover over an image. I prefer this layout, not sure why it's different though. Also, the modal scrolled this time (it was a lot shorter, that could be the problem), but I could still only open one per visit.

Sorry to be so harsh, but as a user my experience on your website was broken, fragmented and confusing. I hope my feedback is useful, if you need any more information about anything I said (user feedback always misses important information, I doubt mine's an exception), let me know.

My best suggestion would be to simplify the concept, a lot. I would suggest infinite scrolling, show me the best stuff you've got as soon as I arrive and for as long as I want to keep looking. Or at least proper pagination, where I can go forward as well as backward. Then, add proper filters. Gender and age are an obvious start (you capture them to some extent in mother/father of course), and then drill down to personality. I'd use the same personality types in the same order for each, but adjust their names for gender/age (eg action man for young boys etc etc..). Or just use the same simple names. Make them checkboxes too, and have the items shown change as I change them.

That would solve a lot of the problems - inconsistency between filters, broken filters, not showing enough products, no proper pagination of results. I expect it'd be a lot more engaging too. I also imagine it would remove a lot of the requests to your server.

Overall, I like the concept, but I think the UX could be drastically improved by a focus on showing more (this could encourage better curation too?) and more general purpose, useful filters.

gjhiggins• 13 years ago

You mean UI not UX, the difference will be crucially important to you.

When inviting informed review of an app, it's useful to outline the design brief.

Given the number and nature of the UI issues reported by other HNers, you might be interested in making use of the resources offered by http://www.usability.gov.

Lastly, I'm a little surprised that your prior user tests didn't give you any hint of the degree of failure, you might want to take a closer look at your user testing process.

Ask HN: What is wrong with our UX?

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