Please don’t start: “In this Industry…..”

Recently, women’s clothing company Whistles relaunched their site, and Econsultancy did a site review of it. Basically, the site is very “visual” and the navigation is quite a long way from the average eCommerce site. This led to a lot of people wading in, brandishing huge egos, with their opinion of the site, positive and negative – mainly negative. The main talking point seemed to be the comment that the designers made:

“We spent a lot of time researching best practice online. We then threw out everything we had learned, and just designed something that pleased us visually.”

This, is my mind, is one of the most ridiculous things someone could say – and its not something that would inspire me to work with an agency. Even with this in mind – I don’t know what annoyed me more, the arrogance of these designers, or the attitude of the people leaving comments on the post.

Reactions

My first reaction when looking at the site was “Wow – I find this site really hard to use,  I don’t think this is going to convert very well at all.” But after browsing around a bit, I changed my mind slightly. It was strange, but everything was there, and you could make purchases.

Many of the comments included “industry experts” reeling off reasons that the site was wrong – and yes, in their eyes there is definitely a right and wrong way. I am willing to accept that there are a set of rules that most eCommerce site abide by in order to maximise the sales that they make, but these guys (yes, they were all guys) were not even willing to entertain a different opinion.

This led to some responses from a woman using very strange marketing jargon to describe the “experience” of the site, and some more sensible women saying they actually really like the site, and had made purchases.

Get Off Your High Horse

I am not saying that I don’t really rate the Econsultancy site reviews, ‘cos I do. And I am not saying that there weren’t some valid comments like “I wonder if sales have seen an increase after the launch?” and “I wonder how the site will perform in 6 months time?”. It just grinds my gears when people start with a “well, in this industry….” and end with a “…and I should know”. They are equally as bad as the jargon-talking agency people that have sold this “vision” to Whistles.

Being able to entertain two conflicting opinions is one of the best signs of intelligence.

Flickr image from DailyM