Wow, what a terrible article. The tl;dr comes down to this -
> Why are these websites bad? Well, I'm a journalist, so I
> asked the companies themselves! This is what they told me:
>
> > We provide our customers with lots of confusing choices,
> > and because of this our websites have to take into account
> > every possible customer with every possible need, so we
> > have to provide a mediocre experience to all of them, and
> > we can't possibly be 'pretty'.
>
> Well, folks! There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth.
> Can't argue with that. Here's something an expert in the field
> said that vaguely confirms what the companies told us [...]
>
> So, really, it's not your fault as a user when you can't
> navigate labyrinthine these sites. It's just a problem with
> humanity. Well, actually it is your fault, if you are a
> member of said humanity. But really, the websites just suck.
> [End of story]
This simply concedes that designing solutions to complex problems is limited to mediocre solutions, 'cuz it's hard!
Have you ever been to the McMaster-Carr website? Every time I visit, I am absolutely amazed by the quality of the user experience.
They have thousands, possibly tens or hundreds of thousands if you count variations, of unique products. Yet I can find exactly what I'm looking for with 3 clicks.
There are solutions to these problems. It's doing everyone a disservice to disregard that and let companies with lazy (or bad) design off the hook. As others have said, perhaps the goal of the design is actually to keep customers confused. We make it too easy to write it off as 'bad design' when it may in fact be underhanded design.
> Why are these websites bad? Well, I'm a journalist, so I
> asked the companies themselves! This is what they told me:
>
> > We provide our customers with lots of confusing choices,
> > and because of this our websites have to take into account
> > every possible customer with every possible need, so we
> > have to provide a mediocre experience to all of them, and
> > we can't possibly be 'pretty'.
>
> Well, folks! There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth.
> Can't argue with that. Here's something an expert in the field
> said that vaguely confirms what the companies told us [...]
>
> So, really, it's not your fault as a user when you can't
> navigate labyrinthine these sites. It's just a problem with
> humanity. Well, actually it is your fault, if you are a
> member of said humanity. But really, the websites just suck.
> [End of story]
This simply concedes that designing solutions to complex problems is limited to mediocre solutions, 'cuz it's hard!
Have you ever been to the McMaster-Carr website? Every time I visit, I am absolutely amazed by the quality of the user experience.
They have thousands, possibly tens or hundreds of thousands if you count variations, of unique products. Yet I can find exactly what I'm looking for with 3 clicks.
There are solutions to these problems. It's doing everyone a disservice to disregard that and let companies with lazy (or bad) design off the hook. As others have said, perhaps the goal of the design is actually to keep customers confused. We make it too easy to write it off as 'bad design' when it may in fact be underhanded design.