Wow! Thank you William for going through the site so thoroughly. This
stuff is gold!
In case anyone wants to follow along, the URL again is
http://www.gogogadget.com.au (saves you looking back over the thread).
William LeFevre wrote:
Looking good. Here’s a couple UI comments for you.
You’ve obviously optimized for 1024 x 768 but I like the way the screen
collapses down to 800 x 600. In particular the reflective logo works
well for the overlapping menu.
I did try my best to make the site accessible in 800x600, just in case.
I would include the blue menu item circles in the menu link. They are an
obvious target and draw people to click on them.
I thought the same thing actually, so good point. I’ll include it in
the todo list.
The search field is only obvious because you have the word search in it.
I think I’d stick with convention here; say a white text field with a
blue border. The solid color is also so prominate that it competes with
and draws away from the browsing links above.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll try it out and see how it looks.
Don’t know if it’s just me or the system but if I do a search, drill
into an item details, and then use the back button, I get a page expired
error. You’ve got bread crumbs but you have to count on people using
built in browser navigation.
Oooh, this sounds nasty. Can any more experienced Rail-ers comment on
this? Admittedly I didn’t use the back button much while I was
developing the site. It looks as though I may have implemented it
wrong. This is my first Rails app, so most of the time I felt like I
didn’t really know what I was doing!
The bread crumbs have few interrelated issues. 1) They don’t stand out
as bread crumbs until you get all the way to the product details. 2)
They’re incomplete (don’t contain top levels) so I can’t use them to do
all my navigation within a list of products. Actually, now that I look
at them again, at the upper levels of branch I’m not sure what they are:
data pivots or bread crumbs. For a large catalog you’re probably going
to want both. For now I’d suggest making then bread crumbs.
Good point on the top level link, I’ll add that definitely. The bread
crumbs/data pivots were fairly half-way done, I didn’t spend a lot of
time on them. I’ll have to go back over it and put a bit more thought
into the design. The site was already delayed by three weeks, so I had
to drop anything that wasn’t super critical.
Looks like your fonts are hard coded. Not good for accesibility.
I thought that I did implement this correctly, but I’m not too much of
an expert. I set my initial font size as 10pt (I think it was 10) and
then used % sizing for each change from there. How should I set my
initial font size for accessibility?
On your detail pages you have link/tabs for Overview, Technical Details,
and Reviews. Some of these don’t have content. I’d only display the link
if it has content and if only one tab has content I might not display
the links/tabs at all.
I agree totally. It was on my list, but I didn’t get time. I will do
it very soon, I don’t like it either.
I like that you change the View Cart link when there’s items in your
cart. Right now it looks like it goes back to the original style after
you’ve visited the shopping cart. It’s a great detail, I’d keep the
style change whenever there is something in the cart.
Cool. I’ll have the style change, but keep the link there all the time
as per your comment further below.
Not taking the user to the shopping cart after they’ve added something
is risky; particularly in a consumer application. First I’d reconsider
that and take the user to chart when they add an item but if you keep it
the way it is I would beef up the “Your item’s been successfully added”
message. It does not jump out at you and you’re definitely left wonder
if you did add the item to the cart.
Yeah, this one was interesting. Originally I was considering having a
little box somewhere to show a brief box of what is in the cart (ala
Apple Store). That may solve it. Going to the cart however may work, I
guess I was thinking that I wanted to encourage further shopping and not
suggest to checkout straight away. I’ll have a think about it all,
including the beefing up of the message.
You should let people edit their orders in the shopping cart. Change
quantity and remove items.
Definitely. A must do.
I got a 404 error when I tried to view your privacy policy from the
footer.
Oooh, thanks for that one. I’ll fix it.
Oh wow. View Cart isn’t on the menu all the time. I’d have it there all
the time with an empty shopping cart page. It’s definitely a part of
your app you want to build location recognition for all the time.
Agreed.
Anyway my quick $.02. I hope some of it was helpful. As a newbie who’s
working on, but yet to deploy, my first application I love seeing the
work of other people out there doing it. Thanks for showing us your
work.
No worries! Thank you for all the valuable feedback, I really
appreciate it. Please pass on the details of your app when it’s
finished so I can check it out.
Cheers,
Dan