A UI experiment: show "just the content" | Hacker News Reader

A UI experiment: show "just the content"

blog.shopobot.com

31 pointscookingrobot25 comments

In response to this thread about how hard it is to see content on the campers shoe site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4032486

We're experimenting with UI for browsing huge sets of options like shoes. What do you think? Refreshing or overwhelming?

Scrollbars really need work. Seems like a clunky way to navigate

Basically you are showing just the pure output of data, which is great, but you need to incorporate a way for users to choose to filter this data. Usecase: I'm trying to decide between two shoes, one is on the top of the page, the other is near the bottom and there is a huge mess of noise between those two items of interest. Maybe put in an area to drag shoes of interest into, not necessarily a shopping cart. This way you can weed through the data and compare the most interesting items before making a purchase.

A direct link to the prototype: http://www.shopobot.com/shop

big queries here.. takes a bit to load.

I think: noscript unfriendly.

Then, it seems crowded. But that's what physical shops are like. Not sure if it's good or not.

Thanks for the feedback! Since we were experimenting with density here, it is fairly extreme. The verdict is out on whether the extra density is valuable when user are in real shopping scenarios.. That's what we'll be testing with different categories and tweaks.

Also please excuse the 5 second loading time.. it's still a prototype.

Throwing 500 error..

Thanks Ben - looking into this, and it should be up again now.

Vertical scrolling of the page is interrupted by the horizontal scrolling of each row of shoes. I consider that broken.

How about having big left and right button either end of each row?

I love the concept and execution. Can't see the demo but the blog speaks for it.

Thanks Eric. We'll work on performance and caching of these big queries in our next update so it can handle the spike in traffic. (this proof of concept was mainly meant for 1:1 user testing, and looks like we still have some query issues to sort out)

I love it. No friction.

Thanks! Did you try it with a trackpad/touch or mouse? Did you discover left/right scrolling?

yep. on macbook pro side scrolling was great... although i imagine that might be a bit unpleasant on less advanced trackpads or desktops.

I think the thumbnails are too small. They should be the size of the larger pic, and the larger pic should be as wide as my browser window, ideally.

I like the look. I don't like the way the horizontal scrollbars appear on mouseover; it's a distraction when I'm moving my mouse over the page.

Good feedback. This was a compromise to allow mouse users to scroll without having to show the scrollbars all the time. There are other approaches we can explore.

This doesn't have much to do with the core idea you're testing, but I'm not wild about the filtering UI. If I click on "Fashion Sneakers" it filters the results, but there's no clear way to get back. It also seems like once you're viewing fashion sneakers, that shouldn't be a link anymore (I get frustrated when a page links to itself). A normal breadcrumb system should work fine.

Showed it to my sister, who is much more interested in shoes than I am. She disliked the small size of the icons, and she had trouble finding the brands of shoes she was interested in. She also wanted to be able to more easily sort by style; she wanted flip-flops, and couldn't easily just look for all flip-flops.

Thanks for this feedback. The filtering system is pretty non-existent in this version (just one level of categories), and that will have to be integrated.

Adjusting what's show in the view is important - either with search, or filter, or by organizing by similar items. Those other pivots will built on top.

For this v1 we were mostly exploring the feeling of this much density and scale of results - so helpful to hear that she thought the images are too small.

I think this is really great for products such as shoes, when basically just looks matter. Left/right scrolling works well with magic mouse, and probably even better on touch devices. Just add simple social features ala Pinterest and you have a winner.

Thanks! Agree that the 2d scrolling works best with magic mouse, or touch, or a good trackpad. We have lots of ideas for social features too - but one test at a time..

All of the white New Balance athletic shoes are for women. Where are the NB men's shoes?

The demo is down.

Thanks. It seems up right now, but with this many users it's taking a while to complete the queries to get started. Sorry about that!

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