02 Feb 2007 1133H

Gap’s QuickLook, and why it works

Been doing a lot of Chinese American/Canadian stuff lately, so I’m going to go back to UE/UX/whatever the hell are we calling it this week for a second.

A lot’s been made of this Gap QuickLook AJAX UI technique recently, I’ve been trying to incorporate it as well in my work for a client recently, because in an AJAX age, there’s little need for the clumsy old master-detail page architecture, where you have a page of items and thumbnails, then you click on the thumbnail to bring you to a detail page, and then if you don’t like it you have to back up and all that razzmatazz. Argh. Must smash.

The reason why it works is because the UE folks at Gap have primed the user for such an expectation: this is the most important part. See, UI surprises are not always nice, because not knowing causes fear. As we all know, fear leads to anger, anger leads to the dark side. ;-)

Here, you mouse over an item, which is very low, practically nothing in terms of costs of user action investment. In return, it gives you an affordance that there’s an actionable item here, in this case, a Quicklook button, and if the user decides to press on, when they click on it, the button changes state and brings up the DIV. The UI cost to the user is very low, and it manages their expectations the entire way, as opposed to being committed and unexpectedly jerked to a whole other page, with all the associated download time and “in-between” time and all that rigamarole. There’s nothing outrageous or egregious here like a popup window that removes your focus. There’s no part of it where the user’s hand is let go and they are left to fall into the interaction abyss. That’s what users don’t want, ultimately, when they encounter new widgets like this.

The thing that I like about this is that it helps the user move to the place they want to go, which is ultimately a purchase, but it does so through improving the browsing or “pre-shop” experience. It helps resolve this “Moy Conjecture” paradox a bit. People want choices, but are practically overwhelmed by too much choice. It does not help you directly make the right choice, mostly ‘cos people have to be told what they want, which people arrive at this online currently through a number of information seeking methods, which we’ve built into Web 2.0: social filtering, reviews, most popular, highly rated, third-party or independent authorities (CNet, Gizmodo, Consumer Reports, so on).

Permanent link to Gap’s QuickLook, and why it works

Filed under User Experience

Respond »

Be the first to respond to "Gap’s QuickLook, and why it works"

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

No responses yet.

And now it's your turn.

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

Your response