ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

shopomposition.com is a shopping site that sells an extremely eclectic mix of products, it seems like a stylish, urban outfitters for grown ups. The web site is a flash extraviganza that puts boo.com to sham, essentially breaks every rule in the book when it comes to ecommerce, web design, usability etc. and it works brilliantly.

I’m not saying it’s perfect but it is beautiful and it uses flash in some very interesting and entirely appropriate ways that makes sense for the kind of store it is.

Findability vs Discoverability

I’m going to focus on one aspect of this store which works brilliantly, and that is “ambient discoverability”. Now many of my most admired IA expert friends will talk about findability, but findability somehow implies intention, I want to find something. What do you do if you sell film cameras, cute monster usb drives, karate robot models and knife magnets?

Click here for some video of the user interface in action demonstrating the flash fly-by

They have solved this problem elegantly IMHO by employing a flash fly-by, that swoops all the product thumbnails past you after you have clicked on a category. Click on gadgets, watch all the cameras and robot models fly-by, almost too fast to see, but enough to give you a taste, until it comes to rest. The beauty of this approach is that it helps mitigate the problem of tunnel vision we often have when viewing a web site.

An Expressive System

Often when interacting with web sites the question is “what do I do next”, this is often because of a lack of cues, if your in an unfamiliar place you look for signs, directions, maps, all cues as to where you should be going. This is how we build mental models, through cues or clues. Web sites often leave users stranded because the users mental model of the web site is incomplete and the web site lacks cues as to what to do next or where to go next.

This is the other advantage of the fly-by approach, that when it’s finished and come to rest, I as a user understand that about 20 or so items are just off to the right of the screen for me to explore. So my cue is to start searching for a device to scroll the screen, this is doubly important because there is no scroll bar, which would normally be my cue for exploration (I told you they broke all the rules.)

Anyway, it’s worth exploring yourself, and one thing i’ll add is don’t try this at home, it is obvious that they have employed some serious animation know-how, to get the timing right, and having dabbled with flash can assure you to get that kind of timing and pacing is extremely difficult. Kudos also to their optimization, I was running there site on a ibook (mac) on firefox, and I didn’t experience any of the usual “flash running in slow motion”, or firefox crashing that i often experience.

Found Via: wildlyapprpriate.com - dan klyn’s blog on information architecture and such