GOOD BAD DESIGN

Good or Bad:

Booking tickets for two people. Seating options are:

Oh please. Sometimes people like to sit opposite one another.

“Your first stop for train tickets”. Last resort.

Good or Bad:

New-ish, rubbish bottle design. Did anyone actually use this before it went to manufacturing?

Always the same story – shampoo everywhere.

Good or Bad:

While the rest of the known universe talks about the iPad, naturally I decide to cover the Support & Downloads page on the Nikon Europe website.

My father was given a digital camera for Christmas this year. Using screen sharing over Skype (very good btw), we plugged it in, got iPhoto going (perfect for my father if not for everyone else), imported, printed and emailed.

But during all this I wanted to have a look at the manual. See what he was seeing. So naturally I went to get it from the Nikon website. And got this:

You probably can’t see too much detail with that image. It’s the text in the grey box on the bottom right that we’re interested in:

I simply do not understand this. What copyright infringement? What are they trying to control here? I understand that Nikon want to try to get every owner of a Nikon product to hand over their personal details but barriers like this are simply that – barriers to a continued dialogue with their consumers.

This makes Nikon look nervous.

Good or Bad:

A photoshoot in a recent edition of Easyjet Traveller magazine showed models posing in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Regardless of whose fault it is, how on earth could that have been thought of as a good idea? Didn’t anyone think, at any point, that there may be something not quite right?

I’m not sure it’s within the remit of this blog to post on this but I’m so astonished that I can’t help myself.

It’s so bad.

Story at W&V

Story at Huffington Post

Good or Bad:

On a product site Search has to be the most important piece of functionality (or at least in the top 3). Therefore it’s worth expending quite a bit of energy getting it right. If people can’t find things then they can’t buy them. You can knock Google as much as you like but they do provide a good search. Used by practically everyone, people increasingly expect all searches to work as well.

On the weekend I was given the details of a pair of jeans in the Levis store in London. Very helpful. Typed ‘Vintage Tide’ into the search and got this:

This is not good. No suggestions of other products, no repetition of the original search term, an ‘off-brand’ typeface and odd choice of language. But perhaps it was just my search terms.

Just to check, I ran a few other searches (click-path below in gallery).

The first was for their Superskinny jeans. Search term was “skinny”. No results.

A search for “superskinny” returned results.

Question: How many users are going to type exactly the right name? Why gamble when the fix is so easy?

The second was a search for “vintage”. The use case here is that we have someone looking for vintage jeans (a lucrative market) but isn’t sure if Levis do any. So it’s simply go to the site and type in ‘vintage’. There’s no mention on the home page.

No results.

But a look in the Collections area of the site reveals that one of the four main sections is Levis Vintage Clothing.

None of these are hard to fix.

I wonder why they insist on pushing vistitors to a domain called eu.levi.com when everyone I’ve ever met ever refers to them as Levis. With an ‘s’. They own the domain.

Komisch.