What I learn from watching Apple
Don Day March 9th, 2008
I haven’t been in my local Best Buy in several years. Yesterday, while spilling out of one DVD aisle and getting ready to dive into the next one, I saw this:
A simple monolithic wall with a pair of white Apple logos and a huge monitor. In front of it, a simple table with several Apple products neatly arranged. Instead of a price sign for each item, you find a flipbook with a tag for each product inside.
The rest of Best Buy is like most local TV sites: cluttered, crammed full of signage, and somewhat hard to navigate. The Apple section is what our sites should be: Simple, understated and organized. Is it a huge, hard challenge? Yes. But are you an advocate for simplicity — for the user — or are you just “doing what you’re told?” Most local TV sites make me nauseous. Flashing this… rotating that… big anchor heads this… cluttered that. We face lots of challenges — and this is a very simple one, but is vitally important. Putting a crazy focus on the best user experience FIRST is the best way to win audience and mindshare.
4 Comments Add your own
1. Rob | March 9th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I talked to Graeme Newell at 602 Communications a week ago and he told me this simple statement: Evolution, not Revolution.
Change won’t happen today or next week. You have to bring along traditional media managers slowly to see how non-traditional / new media / Interweb really works differently than TV.
While what Graeme said makes sense my concern is whether managers realize that by the time they’re ready to get out of the “What’s good for TV is good for the web” mindset, and especially get out of the ‘Instant ROI before we commit to development costs’ mentality, AND treat the Interweb as an autonomous content syndication system the opportunity will have already passed them by.
2. Dan | March 9th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Damn your good Don. You nailed it.
But how do you get TV stations and networks,
who clutter up their own air with bugs and even more
bugs now (for what’s happening next week on ABC
all through the program you are trying to watch)
and programs like the Today Show where things are
moving around so much you can hardly watch the
actual information providers. How to get programing
types and management types like this, with absolutely NO taste and no sense for restraint, to do web sites any different?
Dan
3. Er | March 9th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
It’s really sad that Apple has so few products, they can all fit on one table.
4. Dave | March 10th, 2008 at 8:05 am
I couldn’t agree more. It’s the driving philosophy behind our recent redesign. The results show a clean look can work. Advertisers stand out more. Click-throughs have increased. Pageviews are up. User questions on where to find things are down.
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed