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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

There is widespread realization that people don't care about YOUR website YOUR company or how smart YOU are - you might want to stand out and be cool - but people want to do THEIR business be done with it and go on with their lives.

If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back.

There are of course places/events where it should be an experience, like if I go to fancy restaurant I want "fancy dinner experience". When I am on the road and have to just eat something McDonalds does the job 10 mins and I am out even if it is not best choice food wise.

So setting up your page if it is webshop or streaming service - I don't go there to wonder how cool web design might be - I go there to buy stuff or start video.

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The McMaster website always comes to mind: https://www.mcmaster.com/

Or the reason I walk two minutes farther to a different place for my shopping - they have self checkouts fueled by a single queue. Far more efficient than the closer and cheaper place.

Utility first, uncompromisingly always. This is why we still use terminals. This is why I drive a smaller less cool granny car. It's why people still ride old terrible singlespeed bikes in denmark, and it works. It's why messy desktop icons can be peak efficiency. It's why everything good is good.

I always make the "website" / "webapp" distinction. A website would be the landing page to a product, whereas a website would be like the site you posted. To the former i say go nuts, if I'm exploring a product and I land on your landing page, feel free to completely surprise me with web design.

However, if you operate a webapp, Spotfiy, Gmail, Amazon, etc, settle on a "core UI" and don't change it. People don't want creativity in these kinds of sites, rather they want consistency.

I guess it all boils down to, it's all about the time and place.

I don't like this distinction much. The way you use the term website here is as a descriptor for splash pages nobody cares about beyond their use as a business card.

You can see it in the way you're talking about them like "they don't matter - so do whatever you want". And you're right.

But I find that unsatisfying. We should be able to have it both ways - interesting aesthetic alongside utility.

> I always make the "website" / "webapp" distinction. A website would be the landing page to a product, whereas a website would be like the site you posted. To the former i say go nuts, if I'm exploring a product and I land on your landing page, feel free to completely surprise me with web design.

The first occurrence of "website" in the second sentence was supposed to be "webapp", right?

I'll go out of my way to avoid all self checkout stores. People here love to pull up their full carts and scan every item as slowly as humanly possible. But maybe in Denmark you aren't buying as much. I thought you rode crappy bikes because otherwise they'd get liberated immediately.

I try to avoid them because they enable the store to replace humans with robots.

To replace paid employees with customers working for free, I'd say?

Yep.

It's the exact same amount of robot, just more dumbed down when it's customer facing.

I avoid them because it's not my job to scan and bag groceries.

This is hilarious to me. You would wait longer because nobody is paying you to do your shopping?

I am picturing the hand model from zoolander, with the glass protection orbs, making someone else do absolutely everything for them.

Absolutely. If they're not going to take the cost of the labor off my bill then I'm just doing them a favor by letting them hire one less cashier while shifting an unwanted burden onto myself.

The worker scanning and bagging my groceries is a service that makes my shopping experience more pleasant and less taxing on me. I'm not giving that up in exchange for nothing.

I avoid self-checkouts because it almost always takes longer; something always goes wrong.

The ones I will never use are those which have a voice you can't turn off. Having to listen to those as I queue nearby, all I want for xmas is a HIMARS.

Depending on the situation, I can sometimes operate the U-scan and bag faster than a traditional checkout lane (especially considering the longer wait time for the two open lanes). I worked for quite a few years as a cashier though.

I'm in Ireland, I just use the dutch and danes as funny examples because they are the more regular cyclists but also have the shittiest bikes of any western country, thanks entirely to their topology.

Also, you don't have self checkout "stores" here. Essentially every supermarket has a self checkout section. You can just make your judgement call in there on the fly. It's pretty much always faster though even if someone has a decent sized load due to the shared queue system.

Wow, here in the USA, I never have issues like this. Where I'm at, all the people with huge carts filled with food go to the checkout lines. The only people who use the self-checkout are people with 1-15 items. There usually are at least 6 self-checkout terminals. I look at the checkout counter with a live employee and the are without doubt, always always always so much slower, because they will have 3 people in line with 50+ items.

I think if someone brought 50 items to self-checkout area, they would get knifed in the back.

There are usually at least 6 terminals, so if you have a incompetent idiot on one of them, it doesn't make too much of a difference.

About 90% of the time, there's no line.

The self checkout spot is cheaper if you weigh items as bananas or weigh a produce item as a cheaper/similar produce item.

... not that I've done it or do it... but worked at a grocery store a long time ago in high school and maybe coworkers frequently did this?

I love the McMaster website. It is very much function over form. It's clear that the website is a modern adaptation of the gargantuan multi-thousand page catalogs we used to have.

The website is built first and foremost as a way to find what you need. Buying online is almost an afterthought, there's one link in the header, and the only other indication that there even is an online store is once you click the exact item you want. Exactly where it should be.

It does exactly what it needs to and not much more. It's beautifully functional.

These days I try to avoid physical shops as much as possible. Here in the UK, we have a "supermarket" called Ocado. If you haven't heard of them, please look them up on Youtube[0]. They don't have any physical shops I know of, but have recently started stocking M&S products. They are known in the UK to usually be more expensive, but good quality. It might be the Whole Foods of the UK.

They run warehouses with a grid of rails and seem to be on a mission to automate as much of the logistics and delivery of products as possible. The website allows me to set up a regular weekly order, I can edit it up until the evening of the day before to add any last minute items. I think I pay £10 a month for unlimited deliveries over £40. Having someone bring a weekly food shop to your door for £2.50 is a great deal.

Not only is this a super easy to get food shopping done each week, I can do it from the comfort of my desk (great for when Retros get a little boring!). It also stops me impulse buying things.

I know I already have a December 23rd order coming full of Christmas food and I get to avoid the packed Christmas food shoppers and the depressing Christmas decorations and music in store (I'm a scrooge).

I don't want a better shopping experience, I want the best food, at the cheapest prices, delivered to me in a reliable way. I don't want to think about buying food any longer than I have to each week.

[0] https://youtu.be/ssZ_8cqfBlE

Do you eat the same meals each week? I prefer shopping in person, because it helps me fill in the days on our bi-weekly meal plan that I just couldn't come up with anything interesting to eat for supper.

You can actually get that food pre-chewed too, for added efficiency. Comes in a big tube like caulk.

I thought it came as a dry powder you combine with water and shake?

Preshaken (not stirred) powder

Chewing is an important part of eating.

Being in a grocery store is not an important part of managing or using food supplies.

Hint: I recently cancelled the unlimited delivery service, and discovered that most of the delivery slots we use cost £2 or less and they suddenly started offering us lots of money-off vouchers to keep us coming back.

It's a shame they had to switch from Waitrose to M&S food. When they offered Waitrose stuff, it really was the best food and the best logistics combined. But the M&S quality and range are much less solid in our experience.

I did cancel my delivery plan a while back and noticed you had to go via support. No excuse for this in 2022 with such a modern setup. Obviously it was to retain me as a customer.

I like a nice atmosphere when I go shopping for groceries. It's part of my life as well, and I might as well enjoy it.

How much are you willing to pay for that?

As long as the place is clean and well stocked with fresh items, anything else is worth approximately 0% to 5% to me.

I am willing to pay more to save time. I like my Trader Joes because I can browse every aisle in a matter of minutes. It's also a good place to discover new food items. Finally, this is a personal pet peeve of mine, but I am willing to pay more to not have a shopping cart with a bad or noisy wheel.

They choose more expensive shops arguing better variety or quality but in reality they just want to be in that group buying in more expensive brand shop, walking the same corridors as welthier or more wasteful people. In small towns they are afraid of being noticed by neighbours in cheaper shops - despite it being logically right place to see them, they feel their opportunities and prestige rises when they meet their boss in the same shop. It escalated into creation of galleries milking young generation greedy of showing off. If displaying a hologram of your social media avatar with qrcode above your head was possible they would pay to do this, the more expensive it would be the more eagerly. But of course there is also the middle class's deep wisdom of "the poor can't afford paying twice for a product" - pointing out modern quality problem. But every reason in time gets covered by a custom, for longer than reason exists.

There's a big difference between "grocery store is clean and nice" and "grocery store is setup in a cruel imitation of Ikea designed to force you to wander past every single endcap in an attempt to milk you for maximum dollars".

It's basically a digestive membrane. The parallels between the Ikea shop design and an intestinal tract is striking.

The shop staff would correspond to gastric enzymes.

And this is why I don't like Trader Joe's, even though every member of my family thinks I'm crazy. TJ's is a mini version of an Ikea escape room masquerading as a grocery store.

In what way?

Trader Joe's is a zoo

The last Trader Joe's I was in was set up roughly like this. https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/tulsaworld.com/...

How big was the one you went to if they even had room to make a maze?

Where are you that your Trader Joe's are like this? Every one I've been in is set up just like a normal grocery store with aisles

There’s a high-end supermarket chain in California called Gelson’s. A guaranteed luxury shopping experience. Prices are 20-25% higher than Ralph’s and 15% higher than Whole Foods. Not worth it for me.

> If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back.

You say that but I don’t think it’s entirely true. Ask around and people definitely have strong opinions about grocery stores. This one’s dingy and that one’s organized. This one’s cramped and that one’s too big. This one is laid out weird and that one is too bright.

Just because you’re not looking for a Disney-level experience doesn’t mean you’re not subtly affected (for better or worse) by all these little designed elements every time you go shopping.

Setting a light level and making sure there's room to move around are not really the kind of traits that make things homogeneous.

The layout I don't care, I'll learn it. And the other 90% of design is up for grabs.

bread and eggs aren’t 100% fungible to everyone. So getting the right ones convenient for everyone will be hard.

Some people are solely focused on the dollar price of eggs and bread and don’t care one cent about other impacts, while some others factor in things like animal welfare or organic ag.

Accounting for the options makes it less cut and dry. Do items get grouped by cost level or by item category? Which gets most prominent placement? Is it consistent across stores? How many options is right for each product category?

My main point is that too many marketers/designers/software-devs think that their job is to provide "Disney-level experience".

Article names it "... these regressive trends ..." - so here I disagree because not everything has to be "Disney-level experience" or even fancy.

Yes I go for cleaner supermarket and do less shopping in murky ones but in a way that is discussed in article we discuss *supermarkets are all the same*.

If there would be a supermarket that has some fancy shelve design or tries to surprise me each time I go there I would not care if it is clean and cashiers are supermodels - if I would have to deal with too much nuisance of their shelves to get basic stuff pay and get out.

> If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back.

Nice, now do s/supermarket/Apple

The same goes for non visual things.

I don’t goto YT to be mesmerized by their algorithm.

I am having more fun making content with OpenCV than anything I’ve done at a cloud job in 10 years.

Fingers crossed open ML implodes the tech labor industry by empowering owners of actual hardware rather than a bunch of middle men employees

This is why I hated Flash: some designers would make the experience a game of hunting for the thing you want. Inevitably I'd just give up and not buy anything at all.

This happens in the real world too. My wife wanted a Bulthaup kitchen. They were happy to give us a big book with their product line. But it wasn't a catalogue with sections for sinks, cabinets etc. Oh no, each section was photographs (basically no text) of built-out kitchens. No product names, part numbers, or prices. If you were interested in something you had to go to the shop and point at the thing in the photo to discuss it with a salesperson. A terrible company to do business with.

You can find plenty of interesting UI design in video games: 3D animated menus, non-uniform layouts like radial menus, skeuomorphic design [1], etc. and they aren't difficult to navigate.

> I don't go there to wonder how cool web design might be - I go there to buy stuff or start video.

A gamer starts a game so they can play it, but that doesn't stop designers from making the menu both creative and easy to navigate. They aren't mutually exclusive. If game designers can do this, then why can't everyone else?

[1] https://i.imgur.com/tYuAd4w.jpeg

I like to think of it as delivering our basic needs as efficiently as possible.

Food. Get out of the way and let me buy the food so I can eat it.

Streaming site. Get out of my way so I can experience a story and feel connected to other human beings.

McDonald’s is a very bad example in this case as they have very distinct store fronts and branding and pioneered the whole fast food shopping experience.

They are very much a success on the shoulders of doing it differently.

Agreed. Personally, I like the experience of going to McDonald's with friends. It is a comfy place to hang out, without feeling the pressure of staff trying to turn over tables.

McDonald's used to have very distinct storefronts, but they started remodeling most of them recently and could just as easily be a Starbucks if you replaced the yellow accents with green accents.

And that's how the race to the bottom starts for your brand.

I don't understand your comment.

There's a lot of value in a brand that promises you'll get what you came for, efficiently (and of course, delivers on that promise).

I want to agree but there's a lot of counter examples.

Cite some of those counter examples. Not being snarky. It would be nice to see what those counterexamples are. Good to see a topic from opposite perspectives.

There are companies that deliberately aim to serve as efficiently as possible. A lot of thought goes into communicating and delivering on that promise in everything these companies say and do. Letting people get what they want efficiently isn't that easy to do.

Bad branding is when there's a gap between what a brand promises and what you actually get. A store that promises efficient shopping but just puts stuff on shelves in wrapped packs of twelve, isn't really helping you efficiently get what you want. There are indeed a lot of examples of this (in all industries). But that's because these companies don't put any thought into what they want to be seen as and how they can (continuously) deliver on their promise.

So the promise itself (e.g. "no-frills supermarket" or "amazing shopping experience") is irrelevant, as long as the promise is fulfilled.

Whether there is a market for a promise is another thing altogether, but we're discussing whether positioning your store as the most efficient place to get what you want is detrimental to the brand, which it isn't, as long as you deliver on that promise.

One would think that "people want to do THEIR business be done with it and go on with their lives", but actually people fall for branding and "aspirational" themes more often than not. Especially the people with the money.

Reminds me of Clayton Christensen's jobs-to-be-done talk.

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