It was a completely different mental model driven by a lifetime of shopping in brick and mortar stores and a fundamental misunderstanding of how websites and databases work, which is of course not really their problem nor concern.
For some folks showing out of stock items is a degradation of the experience, for others it's an improvement. Know your audience, or at least pick one to target.
[ ] Show out-of-stock items.
Unchecked by default, to cater for majority use case.Of course that existed. It didn't matter because the initial state did not meet their mental model of how it worked. We probably could have made it the biggest thing on the page and they still would have ignored it because they were not looking for it.
For unrelated reasons we were not hiding out of stock items by default. Wasn't my call.
Many did.
I fail to see what's difficult here. You can simultaneously achieve the following:
- Provide aforementioned filtering switch.
- Sort in-stock results first, or split the results into two groups (in/out stock).
- Mark the out-of-stock results clearly on the search result page, e.g. by overlaying a big "OUT OF STOCK" label on top of the item picture.
At the risk of sounding smug, I think all this requires is thinking about what your users need to make a decision that's in their best interest. The "clicked the product page and then found out it was out of stock" should never, ever happen; that information needs to be available on the search results page.
EDIT:
From your edit I understand that the problem boiled down to these items being shown by default, which was unexpected by the audience. That's truly the kind of issue that may become apparent only after deploying and getting feedback from people. That said, were the out-of-stock items clearly marked on the results page? Personally, I'd be super-pissed if they weren't.
We could have designed for this audience, but at the expense of more numerous, savvy users.
Believe me, we had many very smart people working there, we had a good handle on the situation. There's plenty I left out here to make a point regarding out of stock items and certain expectations regarding them.
Of course, that could be interpreted as snide. Very snide. Pardon me, I feel I must respond from a perhaps cynical perspective, but in the spirit of HN, this should not be interpreted as a personal attack, please consider it as a form of customer feedback resulting from real-world experience...:
Lets imagine your unsophisticated user wants to buy something. Your team has made sure the desired product is splashed on all the relevant search results with vim and vigor, nay, it hunts them down with delightfully appealing charm. Then the not-so-savvy target follows the trail, most assuredly identifying themselves as an eager customer, providing all sorts of delightful self-identifying information so that future marketing will surely be able to follow up with grander offerings specifically targeted to their needs! Sadly, the little "in-stock only[ ]" checkbox was ancillary to the much more important (as determined by high-quality tests run by the best consulting firms or maybe just lower-cost magical thinking) page features like "buy this immediately" button and "most popular choice" banner. Thus the user guided by top-notch design immediately launched into the purchase process and enters payment and shipping information as prompted, then clicks the final checkout button only to be informed by pop-up the item is out of stock! To add insult to injury your site actually authorizes the payment and says the item is backordered and thus delivery may be delayed N+1 weeks, where N is the limit of what any reasonable person would expect and WTF didn't it tell them before it went down this rathole.
At which point my spouse/parent/adult child comes to me and asks me why they found this thing to buy but they can't seem to get it...to which I reply, this is a scam, cancel payment if you made it and don't fall for it again. You gave them your email address, so they'll be sending you scammy emails trying to get you buy more non-existent stuff that looks perfectly wonderful to you because they know something about you, like a con artist would pitch you. Make sure you block them. If anyone tells you otherwise, it's a high probability they're either misinformed or getting paid to hook you into another round of pointless web-surfing for nothing...except maybe glittering eye-candy.
Of course, capitalism is wonderfully insensitive to your morals and remarkably efficient (capitalism is just an observation, not a theology) and even if you build your business on a tower of socially tolerable deceptive and user-disdaining practice, well "there's a sucker born every minute" so you may likely still develop enough margin to succeed in your enterprise, and may thus afford to disdain those less savvy users...
You couldn't purchase out of stock items. This is why this whole debate is silly to begin with. I shared an interesting anecdote with minimal relevant details and I get told how we did it all wrong. That's the side of HN I don't come here for, the Monday morning quarterbacking from something over six years ago.
No, didn't really mean it personally despite my exasperated tone and abuse of pronouns. Sorry. You put it out there and I assumed it was intended as relevant for discussion. It triggered my perception of...Snide. Meta-discussion on this topic would be contrary to HN guidelines, I think.
But what I wrote, I wrote from the heart.
so many complains about it on their social media.
I'll also note: when I go to a store and something is out of stock, I find an empty shelf where the item would go that usually has a little tag dedicating that space for that item and telling what its price would have been were it in stock. If I don't find that empty shelf, I end up wandering the store thinking it must just be in a different section and eventually ask someone who works there where to find it, because I am confused, and I am now costing the store money for a sale they aren't even going to get (as the item is out of stock). I thereby don't even agree that the physical metaphor of going to a brick and mortar store makes any sense as an argument for hiding out of stock search results, as brick and mortar stores actually do return placeholder hits for items that are out of stock, both when you ask an employee "where might I find X" (who probably doesn't know if they are out of stock) and when you go to the right section and scan for "what items exist that are similar to X".
I see your point but I'd say it can be for certain items. A stupid example: if I was shopping for air fresheners (I'm not;-) I'd rather not see my search results in the webshop polluted by every discontinued version of Wunderbaum they ever had in stock.
And there is a difference between being temporarily out of stock and discontinued.
In stock first, out of stock second.
There's three issues with this:
1. In UX, hiding things is a lazy solution to not being able to effectively differentiate items by relevance. There isn't an easy one-size-fits-all answer to doing the latter, which is why you need good, experienced UX people. Hiding things is what the inexperienced/lazy/bad ones do instead.
2. "Polluted" is also a codeword for "not of the clean, white, zero-inbox aesthetic I desire", and in certain situations this excuse is overused to enormously degrade UX in favour of a contrived sense of visual "cleanliness". A functional UI shouldn't be "clean", it should contain all the information you need to see (in a clear, differentiable, non-confusing way).
3. This is a stretch, but I think ideal system would differentiate between "currently out of stock" and "discontinued", and filtering out the latter is slightly less of a glaring issue.
Some bad managers don't think beyond the "awful badge" visuals.