Cram a bunch of ways of finding products on to every page (except for the checkout flow), and people will find at least one thing that works for them.
It's completely offensive to our designer sensibilities, but what they've found is that users just tune out the parts of the page that don't work for them and go right to the parts they use (almost like muscle memory). It's the kind of thing you can only do on a site with a lot of repeat customers.
It's the one reason I absolutely loathe going there.
You are not an average IKEA shopper.
My girlfriend loves going to IKEA for that reason. She looks through everything from couches to decorative cardboard boxes because of the 'walking trail' layout. Hence an hour of entertainment that she knows will be fresh and interesting every 6 months or so.
I once tried to convince her to take a shortcut to get what we actually needed and she looked at me like I was crazy and we were supposed to follow the arrows.
But I don't buy things from IKEA, I carry them. She is their target market and they give her a good experience.
To their credit, they do give away those little maps of the store -- don't remember if they include the shortcuts on them. Oh, and the smoked salmon is good too.
The purpose of this interests section was to form some non-work connection of interests with the interviewer. What happens if you look at a block of words like that is that your mind instantly picks out words that are meaningful to you.
It was an interactive, mind-reading resume.
Product A + Product B + Product C = Total
writes the man that wrote a post 3 scrolls deep.
An alternative, for example, might be only showing the top ranked opinions, plus some minimalist options to find the others if you want them (a list of categories, a search bar, a "complete index" link...).
Do you have any examples of websites that have ginormous amounts of content and simple, un-cluttered interfaces? And don't say google, because that's different.
The immediate idea I have is not to used fixed layouts and less 'blurb'. I'm looking at the Opinion site at the moment (the design of which has changed since last night) and I'd prefer if instead of giving me a blurb about Nicholas Kristof's piece it just said Nicholas Kristof on the Millennium Development Goals.
I might look at mocking up an alternative, though. I'd like to see if I can come up with something that would suit at least me.
...not that that makes you crazy, though. Maybe crazy people just spend more money online than you do. :)
Sure, they could display less. Ten rows, two columns – that sounds to me like they picked a nice round number without much thought. Five would do but in this day and age scrolling is easy. (This guy also seems to have a screen with a low resolution. I have only 900 vertical pixels and I have to press page down three times.)
You're not crazy.
We all want clean sites and easily accessed information. I'd pay good money for a site that presented me with nigh-perfectly organized personalized "information" (be it news, sports, articles, tech articles, etc.), but nobody can do it.
So in lieu of the impossible they use the shotgun method, and it works.
Purists hate it. $ > purists.
