03 Sep 2006 2222H

Montauksofa.com: a review

montauksofa.com homepage
For years, I’ve seen their ads in magazines like Chicago that cater to an affluent yuppie clientele: the ad copy tells, in first person, the story of an attractive, white, freshly-minted divorcee, who ticks off a list of petty grievances against her former husband, but decides to let the ex have everything but the Montauk chair. The furniture simply looked decadent: clean lines, but overstuffed, so that the whole thing seemed ready to wrap itself around you like a giant down pillow, and would surely lull you, within moments of settling into its plushness, into a deep, sonorous somnolence. Those ads made me want to go visit a Montauk showroom — fortunately we have one here in Chicago — and I still covet owning a room of Montauk furnishings someday, just on the basis of the story about the product alone. Unfortunately, the current online experience has traded Flash for fantasy. It has well and truly fallen into the old New Economy trap of being far more in love with the technology than the story that the technology should help tell in support of the sales process. As such, it’s a liability to the brand and to the product itself.


To begin with, there’s the splash screen, “Let’s Tauk,” which ostensibly invites the user to dialogue with the product, and could be tolerated for a high-end product which sells itself largely on intangible qualities, yet it does nothing to further develop the story of where the product fits into the owner’s life, or the values with which the brand is associated, and the tagline is fleshed out nowhere else on the site.

Montauksofa.com homepage
Then comes a dreary rotoscope of disconnected images, largely of white people and furniture, none of which are clickable, moving fast enough to cause the viewer to nearly vomit from motion sickness. And then there is nothing to indicate what other actions or news or latest info are available. There is nothing to draw the viewer deeper into the site.


After discovering the navbar, on clicking on the subsections, we are regaled again by a vertical scrolling marquee, laden with long-length, heavy-weight text of equal visual weight, scrolling too quickly to read comfortably, and yet, cannot be controlled by the viewer, nor reviewed or scanned for salient points.


The catalogue is perhaps the worst offense in this website. Both vertical and horizontal scrolling are used here, creating a motion sickness and usability nightmare that dissuades the user from both reading the text and from finding, much less investigating the furniture they would like to buy.

montauksofa.com detail page
If one manages somehow to escape this Temple of Doom (by quickly clicking on one of the pictures), they are brought to a detail page for that product, but there is no indication of the scale in the measurements, whether metric or Imperial, and the choice of the left-right or next-previous subnav is also a poor one, since the furnishings are not obviously ordered in a manner that would make such a navigational element appropriate. There is no mechanism for sorting or ordering the information into categories or other criteria that the user could use to narrow their choices. Moving down the page, finally, the use of the light grey Bodoni, on the bottom location bar, with all the cities run together, is a dubious choice since the weight of the typeface and the size combine to make it more important than the navbar at top, and the arbitrary choice of running all the text together also creates a readability and findability issue. To be fair, the designer has adopted the heuristic that the system reflects a state change and provides feedback to the user by darkening the text for the currently selected item, both in this bottom nav and in the top nav.

However, to pound the last nail into the coffin, as of this writing, a rather stupid typo, repeated in the pop-up address box for the San Francisco showroom, and an error in the ZIP Code, casts a shadow on the legitimacy and seriousness of the brand and the product. Did no one bother to proofread this copy?

With over 10 years of online marketing experience behind all of us now, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how and why such a high-end product came to be represented by such a poorly designed website. My first and traditional reaction as a designer has been to castigate the designers and art directors responsible for such bad work, and my gut sense is that this is probably the case: this is the work of an ambitious but inexperienced designer who somehow managed to gain the ear of a Montauk exec. But as I grow older, increasingly tasked with areas of ever greater responsibility, I’m finding it is more and more the case that bad work is equally, if not more so, the responsibility of poorly-informed executives who have little to no design knowledge or capacity for appropriate creative leadership decision-making.

These executives often hold sway over the creatives, and in fact many times see them as an instrument or a “set of hands” to execute their own, often shoddy “creative vision,” based on their own highly subjective, uninformed criteria about creative direction. They have often not attached the creative effort to the larger corporate strategy, have not done the appropriate brand audit to ensure they are consistent with the corporate voice, and have not been educated to make the appropriate decisions. On the other hand, if this is the case, it is only because creatives often cede this power of ultimate creative decision making, without making the appropriate educational effort, to those who can’t be relied upon to distinguish the difference between say, an abstract expressionist line from an modernist architectural one. Ultimately I would say that’s not even an individual failure of management, but an organizational one: the failure of an organization to make design a corporate value.

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2 responses to "Montauksofa.com: a review"

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21 May 2008 1000H

Joey B writes:

Years ago they had a great site where you could click on a color and see what each piece of furniture would actually look like. It was a terrific selection so you could pick out different slipcovers. I don’t see that now with just the shades of gray site.

21 May 2008 2128H

Gino writes:

May be time to review this site again.

And now it's your turn.

Fire your weapon, soldier. Just be careful of friendly fire. NAME & EMAIL required.

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