May 2000 Issue of
WebBusiness Magazine
A Closer Look Index
BY LOU ROSENFELD
 Louis Rosenfeld is president of Argus Associates, which specializes in providing information architecture consulting to Fortune 500s. He is coauthor of the best-seller, Information Architecture on the World Wide Web. Read previous installments of "A Closer Look." |
hile I like to kick websites and dogs, I am generally nice to children. So I recently found myself at the Toys'R'Us site, looking for the baby registry. Before I had a chance to look, I was hit squarely between the eyes by one of the more visually disjointed main pages I've seen in a while:
Sure, there are a lot of images; a toy store should be fun, and we all know that more flashing images mean more fun, right? But what is the purpose of showing white visual elements on gray backgrounds? Take a close look at the tabs, the "help" and "my account" options, and the shopping cart icon: they are all surrounded by small white fields against a gray background. This seems to be an obvious HTML error; regardless, these are visually confusing, and are likely to throw off users who will get the idea that this website is not closely supervised by its corporate parent. Some users will assume that if Toys'R'Us can't get the basic cosmetics of its main page to work, it will not be able to fulfill and ship a product order successfully. Little things can lead to Big Problems, and for Toys'R'Us's sake, I hope they get their HTML fixed soon.
This Month's Main Gripe
But I digress: back to baby. Here is what you'll see when you go to the Baby Registry page:
You'll note a lot of unnecessary explanatory information on this page, such as text that explains which fields are optional and which aren't. (There is already a well established convention for handling this distinction much more elegantly and economically). But what really stands out is the following statement:
"PLEASE NOTE: We do apologize, but our Baby Registries are currently "View Only." To purchase an item from the registry, please visit your local Babies"R"Us or Toys"R"Us store."
Danger, Will Robinson, danger: never, ever, ever lead with an apology. What's true for a speech is true for a website. While many might find this early admission to shortcomings refreshingly honest, we sharks who critique websites for a living smell blood. Toy'R'Us might as well have used blinking orange text to notify users that the site is broken, poorly designed, or prematurely launched.
Let's move forward into the baby registry and take a look for my friend Amy Smith from California; here are the results:
This search results display should help us out much more than it does. It should provide more information for each mother listed, such as the father's name (if known) and anticipated date of birth. That would help us figure out which Amy (or was it Amie?) we're supposed to be shopping for. Having a navigational option that leads us back to the search interface would be helpful if we wanted to refine or reenter the query after finding 400+results. Now let's take a look at Amy Smith's entry in the registry (here's where things get really bad):
What's missing from this picture? Oh, a few basics, like:
It would also be nice to allow the parent to enter some personalized information, like where and when the shower takes place. Or whether or not they already know the baby's gender. Or if the nursery will be decorated in baroque or art deco stylings. Or if they'll only accept clothing woven from virgin hemp grown by Guatemalan altar boys.
This Month's Moral: Don't Launch Before You're Ready
You can't always launch what you want. Or, more accurately, when you want. In may cases, including this one, it's better to wait until you're ready.
Certainly a simple registry list is useful. And perhaps this one is intended to be an intermediate step along the way to providing fuller functionality, such as the ability to add products from the registry directly to a shopping cart. While such functionality isn't uncommon, it is by no means trivial, and I'll bet that many users wouldn't be crestfallen to find it unavailable for the time being.
But this version of the registry seems so unfinished that it is easy to wonder why it was launched in the first place. A rush to keep up with a competitor? A "launch it or lose it" deadline imposed by a CIO on the web team? It's a mystery, but everything from the initial apology to the lack of any integration with the rest of the site screams "WE'RE NOT READY TO LAUNCH YET!". I hate to say it, but the Toys'R'Us baby registry is a preemie, and I hope it survives the harsh elements of e-commerce.
Read previous installments of "A Closer Look."
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