Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com • Hacker News Board

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#151

Post by yamtaddle » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

spchampion2 wrote: post #121

geodel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By comparison, the typical consumer shopping experience is much more one of discovery, not need-solution mnatching. Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine. > Keep in mind the average HN user is not the typical shopper. You and I migh…

> Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine. When inside of a real brick and mortar store, have you walked by one of those displays on the ends of a row that's selling Pepsi products or Doritos? How do you think those things got there? Th…

Yes, of course end caps are doing the same thing, prioritizing the store's needs over the shopper's. They pull the same shit with how they lay out the store, to make you spend more time in it and travel over more of it. Which turns out to mean they're not just prioritizing profit over what's personally best for their shoppers, but also over public health, when there's serious infectious disease on the loose—which is all the time, and especially every Winter, but we got a particularly memorable lesson in the cost of that sort of thing, rather recently.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#152

Post by 10xDev » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:02 PM UTC

Sure, when you are a supplier of tools this is a great example. However, to point this as a shining example for all eCommerce sites is simply misunderstanding the difference in target audiences and products. For example, a person may visit a site looking for a gift. To such a customer it helps to have images and bold titles tell them why a product is worth their attention and money. Apple goes as far to lay out its specs in a long presentation with animated 3D models because their customer may not even understand what all the specs mean or just find it tedious and move on to see what Google has. One size does not fit all.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#153

Post by geodel » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

hammock wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Compare this to, say, Amazon where Amazon's needs are prioritized over the customers' I'm not sure that's the whole story. A critical point is that this is a B2B site. The people shopping here would tend to have a need in mind that can be solved by finding the exact right part that meets their specifications. By comparison, the typical consumer shopping experience is much more one of discovery, not need-solution mna…

Wonder how much of that is actually a preference of typical consumers, and how much it is just being forced on them. > stimulus, sparks of ideas, reviews and testimonials, and all the other "cruft" that was removed from McMaster.com In meatspace this is often discussed as customer-abusive design - overloading senses with shapes, colors, sounds and smells, confusing and ever-changing shop layout forcing shoppers to wa…

Great point.

At this point it is pretty clear Amazon is fattened on sweet billions from ads. To add insult to injury they also get to say We are delighted to offer ten thousand brands of USB cable in hundreds of colors to suit every personal style

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#154

Post by yamtaddle » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

hammock wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Compare this to, say, Amazon where Amazon's needs are prioritized over the customers' I'm not sure that's the whole story. A critical point is that this is a B2B site. The people shopping here would tend to have a need in mind that can be solved by finding the exact right part that meets their specifications. By comparison, the typical consumer shopping experience is much more one of discovery, not need-solution mna…

Wonder how much of that is actually a preference of typical consumers, and how much it is just being forced on them. > stimulus, sparks of ideas, reviews and testimonials, and all the other "cruft" that was removed from McMaster.com In meatspace this is often discussed as customer-abusive design - overloading senses with shapes, colors, sounds and smells, confusing and ever-changing shop layout forcing shoppers to wa…

> Wonder how much of that is actually a preference of typical consumers, and how much it is just being forced on them.

I can just about guarantee it's mostly the latter.

My elderly dad was shown how to do a couple things on Craigslist, years ago, and has been using it without assistance for years.

Meanwhile he often has to ask for help with the fucking phone app on his phone. And every time Google updates it or he gets a new phone, he has to figure it all out again. For no benefit, just to be able to do the same shit he already could.

Design thrashing and all kinds of slow-downs and animations and "helpful" pop-ups and crap make things harder on everyone, it's just that some of us can push past it. It has a cost, but we become blind to it because we're so used to putting up with it. A few seconds lost there, a couple minutes here, but we've forgotten about it by the end of the day. For those on the edges it's catastrophic to their ability to actually use their devices for anything.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#155

Post by davnn » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

julianlam wrote: post #113

geodel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By comparison, the typical consumer shopping experience is much more one of discovery, not need-solution mnatching. Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine. > Keep in mind the average HN user is not the typical shopper. You and I migh…

I was (and still am) frustrated with Amazon's practice of showing me what _they_ think I want, instead of what I searched for. It violates a basic tenet of the server-client relationship, serve what the client asked for. I was happy to discover that AliExpress didn't do these shenanigans. You search for an item, it shows matches. Wonderful — and then they changed it, so now halfway through your results, you'll see co…

I have made the opposite experience. I enjoy the search results Amazon provides, but find it incredibly difficult to find the right product on AliExpress. How do you navigate the seemingly auto-translated jungle of similar products on AliExpress?

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#156

Post by gumby » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

divbzero wrote: post #150

gumby wrote: post #54

Unmentioned is the origin of much of this value: > McMaster-Carr shoppers don’t encounter distractions; you can see proof of this on the homepage which jumps right into the action: The web site is based on the paper catalogue (book), from layout, visual interface, and organization. The paper version was excellent and useful. Instead of trying all sorts of "fun" (for the designer) web capabilities, they focused on ohw…

I believe the parent is referring to Sigma-Aldrich? Here is an example of their search results: https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/search/edta

Indeed, I was referring to Sigma's and Fisher's old paper catalogues. Mcmaster seems to have done the best at preserving that value.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#157

Post by ericwood » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

recursive wrote: post #126

ericwood wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh this is interesting; right click and "open in new tab" seems to work, but cmd+click (my preferred method) doesn't. They must have something else going on that interferes with it, very strange.

It all works on my machine. Firefox/Win11. Not sure what's happening for you.

I'm on MacOS; I think I found the issue in the code they use for navigation. It's checking for ctrlKey on the MouseEvent and not MetaKey as well, which is what CMD maps to on MacOS. I might email them about it.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#158

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

mihaic wrote: post #119

I always see McMaster-Carr praised on HN, but almost never does it seem to be acknowledged as website that can only exist for engineers. Generalizing anything from it onto the general internet population seems like thinking about education starting from a great calculus course: some useful lessons can be learned, but you do need to acknowledge that the average problem is very different. And in the end we're left with…

I disagree. Yes, the specific website is for engineers and manufacturing businesses, but everything discussed here and in the article applies just as much to any e-commerce store. The core idea is: the store doesn't waste your time.

> And in the end we're left with: make a fast website, clean UI, intuitive flows.

That is what almost all e-commerce platforms fail at, on top of abusive, adversarial design.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#159

Post by beachy » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

skilled wrote: post #100

This year's UI/UX trends have been an absolute disaster. Many brands are now using some kind of an amalgamation of animations + on-scroll effects that transition into this linear 3D experience. Replit is a good example of this, even though what they are doing is quite tame to what I have seen. Now, the crazy thing about this trend is that I honestly just close the page whenever I encounter it. And I am 100% positive…

> This year's UI/UX trends have been an absolute disaster. Many brands are now using some kind of an amalgamation of animations + on-scroll effects that transition into this linear 3D experience. Replit is a good example of this, even though what they are doing is quite tame to what I have seen.

Probably because those trends are set by UI designers sitting in ivory towers.

If UI trends were instead set by people who actively used sites over and over for their day job, they would be far more appropriate and effective.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#160

Post by genewitch » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 10:46 PM UTC

daveguy wrote: post #81

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know no one else offers this, definitely not at the scale McMaster's dataset offers. As an industrial engineer, most of my vendors offer this. I can get 3D CAD for robot arms, grippers, IO blocks, motors, cameras, enclosures, valves, cylinders, and just about everything else that goes in my machines. However, you're right that these don't have the same scale that McMaster does; they're selling the huge…

> No, it won't actually be strong enough to move that 3-ton casting even once, but you can trivially check that the meshing works as you expect. This is the opposite of what I have found. I wouldn't use 3D printed parts for any sort of interfacing / tolerance check because pla usually prints > 0.2mm out of spec. But, maybe you have a better 3d printer or I misunderstood exactly how you use it. Do you have a 3d printe…

I have one 3d printer that ca. Do dimensionally accurate parts as long as they're smaller than ~50mm all dimensions.

With the most fine settings the slicer will do, it's within 20 microns in all dimensions, and usually it's so accurate my calipers show no error at all, which puts the error either under 5 microns or 1 micron, I forget.

The biggest issue with PLA is it shrinks a bit, so a perfect print is usually about 102%ish of the drawing size; the slicer manages all of that, though.