A quote from the under appreciated Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

I’m considering replacing my Citizen watch as it’s more a decorative timepiece than anything else (the battery is dead, I wear it when I need to dress up a bit). Let’s have a look at the ESQ SWISS website.

1. The ubiquitous “Skip Intro” as a Flash movie greets us. Select “Canada” when prompted. The entire site is Flash based which precludes deep linking - landing inside the site because a search engine or other site directed you there.
2. Resolutions are trending upwards and the majority of us are at 1280 x 1024. The content of this site (excluding the navigation) is limited to a minuscule area of the screen some 425 x 425 pixels wide.  Normally I have to aggressively resize images to fit them in the blog; this is pretty close to what you’ll see at the ESQ site.
3. The font size on this screen is 9px - very tiny.  Taxing to read even with my 20-20 vision.  Copyright or disclaimer text?  Sure, not the navigation for your site.
4. All of the wording is in CAPITAL LETTERS removing the font hints that we rely on to rapidly process text. The effect isn’t as disturbing here because of the short headings.
5. Usage of the letter “U” in place of the word “You” is somewhat surprising given the appearance of and market for ESQ wristwear. The watches run from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Do you envision the wearer of the diamond studded watch texting “omg u have 2 see my nu watch!!” to the girls in 1st period English? Not likely.

I’m interested in a watch and “STYLES FOR U” seems like a good pick… I mean I have to pick something and I have no idea - may as well pick the first one. The drop-down (shown below) is “COLLECTIONS” (variously coloured rectangles are mine):

1. Here we have a list of approximately 20 ESQ collections and unless you’re an ESQ employee you’ll certainly be lost. “KINGSTON”? “SIMONE”? “MUSE”?
2. The drop-down has a thin, 1-pixel line on the left and no other defining characteristics, overwriting the navigation with invisible borders in a way that makes the page appear broken (indicated in green).
3. The absolute worst problem with the ESQ site is how there is no overview of a line of watches. In order to view a complete collection, you have to manually page through dozens (hundreds?) of watches one at at time. This process is slow and painful to sit through.
4. The previous and next watches are desaturated and shown to the left and right of the current timepiece. This is a hint that there are things off screen in either direction yet both distract from the timepiece front-and-center.

Contrast this with the Roots Canada website:

Do you feel as though you cannot predict which kinds of watches you’ll see when you click those headings? Notice also the use of a representative watch from each collection, making the text headings almost redundant - simply reinforcing our idea of which style we’re about to choose.

Let’s have a look at the Classic Watches.

I can tell right away I’m interested in only one watch and that happened in 1 to 2 seconds. Seconds. Detour Watch for Men - Brown. We process colour preattentively which eliminated half of he watches before I even know what I was looking at.

To examine the same number of watches at ESQ’s site, it would have taken 15-30 seconds.

If you knew of a way to speed up decision making by 15-30x, would you do it?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.