He must confirm his order on the Order Summary page.Īs shown in Figure 14, the first text on the page emphasizes the incompleteness of the order. After the customer adds all of his desired books to the shopping cart, and completes his payment and delivery information, there's one final step in the buying process. To understand the fix, let's examine the newly redesigned Order Summary page. In particular, the redesign solved one of the biggest ease-of-use problems on. We were pleased to see many improvements in the new design. Hide the buy button, and deluge the user with text and toolbars, while selling a book on good information design.Īs we were preparing this report, Barnes & Noble launched a redesigned website, rendering some of our original comments invalid. This design is a great way for Barnes & Noble (and Amazon, on whose site we found the same problem) to lose sales. The only links at theīottom of the page are those that take customers to other pages - away from this potential sale. When they finally get to the bottom of the page, there's no way to buy the book. Worst of all, consider what happens when customers are especially interested and go on to read the five screenfuls of reviews and commentary below. It's not accompanied by a text link, which more users would notice.It's overshadowed by the humongous logo-and-toolbar graphics on top, and by the three yellow buttons below.It's nearly identical to two nonbuy buttons (“Go” and “Shopping Cart”).Amidst nearly two dozen other options, one small graphic peeps: “Add To My Cart.” The all-important buy button is designed all wrong: To see how, take a look at the top of the page.
Here's the problem:īarnes & Noble makes it difficult to start the buying process. On the contrary, the problem with this page affects every book Barnes & Noble sells. We're not suggesting that Barnes & Noble specially design a new page to sell a book on information design. We counted no fewer than 20 buttons and links in just the first screenful of text, which was followed by about five more screenfuls of data. Ironically, this excellent book on proper information design was being sold on a page that suffers from acute information overload. To test the buying process on Barnes & Noble, we bought a recent book by one of our favorite designers: Visual Explanations, by Edward Tufte. If Barnes & Noble is so similar to Amazon, why include it in the report? Two reasons: first, to point out that even in an ultracompetitive online book market, both companies are making many of the same mistakes and second, to discuss a powerful result of Barnes & Noble's recent redesign. For example, a search on “selling the dream” yielded search results almost identical to Amazon's. Unfortunately, it also suffers from similar ease-of-use mistakes. Table of Contents | About the Second Edition | Executive Summary | Introduction | Apple | Dell | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | America Online | Microsoft Expedia | CDnow | Outtakes | Creating the Good | Authorsīarnes & Noble, Amazon's chief competitor online, shares many of the same strengths of Amazon. In Search of E-Commerce | Barnes & Noble In Search of E-Commerce, from Mark Hurst and