When does the business case trump the user experience?

Written January 12, 2012. 6 comments.

Doing research on some websites recently, a colleague and I were discussing the usability and user experience compromises that seem pretty obvious on the popular Catch of the day web site.

At the time of writing, said web site has 500+ products displayed on the homepage alone, sans any sort of pagination or filtering. In addition, a little testing in Firebug also revealed the homepage to have over 500 requests (obviously, but I think it actually stopped counting at 500) and a 5.4mb page load. Ouch.

Apparently the case can be made that – because all the products are displayed in one continues downward stream – this exposure will result in more sales, as the user will keep scrolling down and looking at every product, and therefore any suggestion of introducing a better user experience (through pagination and filtering) is irrelevant.

I have not seen any research to back this up, but on the surface it could make sense and perhaps COTD has some stats to leverage from. Or it could be an ill-conceived act of desperation to win more sales in a heavily diluted daily-deal market. All I know is that if it were my website I wouldn’t dream of doing it that way. I should let you also know this exact same strategy has been employed on their other web site Grocery Run.

In this post I’d like to, if possible, get the opinions of both user experience/usability experts and also e-commerce web site owners, to discuss the benefits and compromises this sort of strategy may have.

What do you think? User experience disaster or genius approach. Discuss.

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Who is That Web Guy?

Michael is a veteran web designer / developer / usability evangelist, practitioner of W3C guidelines, and currently head of the web dev unit at Stormbox, a branding and creative communications agency located in Perth, Western Australia.

6 Responses to When does the business case trump the user experience?

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Marco says:

January 12, 2012 at 5:34 pm
Don’t over analyse it. Looks like desperation like you said.
Kirsty says:

January 12, 2012 at 6:49 pm
As a consumer I’d rather be able to see only the stuff I’m interested in. I rolled the mouse wheel down a few times and noticed the scrollbar hardly moved and then I didn’t want to continue. Dont see how it could be working for them.
Josiah says:

January 12, 2012 at 8:21 pm
In the case of COTD it probably boils down to the business model employed. If COTD is payed by the vendors at a fixed rate for the deal displayed on the website than 500 products means 500 x the revenue. Its not a particularly sound strategy as it will alienate users and deliver worse results to the vendors (they have to compete with 500 other products for business). The gains will probably be short term as vendors will start to drop off. The question is as the vendors leave and the site has less products – will it gain popularity again, perpetuating the cycle?
James Royal-Lawson says:

January 12, 2012 at 10:47 pm
Of course without having access to some stats and their goals, we’re just guessing… but, I suspect that the first page of COTD is designed to exploit… maximise conversations… by COTD “addicts” – Those people that visit the site every day and check out the new deals/soon ending. These people will scan down the page and impulse buy. Individual pages perhaps have more (long tail) entrances via search engines; people who are looking for the product… which is no longer available, so the aim then is to get them to sign up for future offers/next time it appears. so: start page = impulse buying individual pages = encourage membership That said, I can see a whole load of things I’d improve!
Anders says:

January 13, 2012 at 6:46 am
@Josiah you hinted at what I was thinking that there’s a good chance they are alienating their user base. It’s one of those situations where poor usability can affect the conversion rate but at the same time maybe the % of “affected” users is low enough that it doesn’t matter. Or it could be they don’t have a clue what they’re doing. One thing is for sure is I wouldn’t suggest that method to any client.
That Web Guy says:

January 13, 2012 at 9:36 am
Thanks all. The main theme I’m getting from here (and from those who responded through twitter) is it’s hard to gauge the effectiveness (if any) without any stats. @James Royal-Lawson: there’s a lot I would improve too! @Josiah: Good point about the vendor competition. I’m wondering now how the vendors feel about seeing their products among competitors on a site that traditionally has been about having just one product featured each day. @Kirsty: Ditto.