Vent
What is it about outdoor gear manufacturer's sites? Why do they all have to use so much flash that it is difficult to find information about their products, whether you know about them or not.
The latest guilty party that I have found is
Scarpa. Shopping for hiking boots is difficult enough. After trying on about 12 pairs, I figure I'd go home and think about it, so along with my notes, and pictures from the manufacturers websites, I was able to keep the details of each boot fresh. However, encountered one of my long standing pet peeves. Finding what I needed on the site was not to difficult. However, page took about 3 seconds fully load, and the detailed descriptions of the boots overlay the picture and specs.
I found the same problems when researching ski and snowboard equipment last year.
Burton,
Salomon,
Ride,
K2 ,
DC -- all guilty.
Elan's and
Rossignol's sites were probably the lesser of evils. A few sites offered useful features, such as a comparison grid, or a questionnaire to help pick the right equipement and most offered detailed specs on their equipment, but most were difficult to use. For example, they would require you to navigate starting from the top of the chain to select a different model. Then once you found the model, it was impossible to save a link to that item for future reference, or to copy and paste the information, since the text was embedded into a Flash animation. Few sites offered a printer-friendly version of the page. Most pages had embedded scroll bars, so that even if you did a screen print, you would not get the full text.
The fix? These web site designers all need to read
Jakob Nielson's Designing Web Usability.
