Sears Fantasy Makeover

Case Study: Sears

People are fairly concrete and absolute about their needs. Say you are designing a home page for Sears.

Here is the sears page as it is now(May 2007). Note the main "Meat" are hidden under topnav sectional buttons; the page is "all splash, no meat.

Here is a retreatment with key subsections listed, a smaller banner, and the links homogenized and made vertical.

What has been done here

There are two major changes in this layout.

1. All panels and sublinks have been made homogenous
2. The submenus from the former blue category tabs have been brought to the home page. This last item is the most important one relevant to the Frazette Postulate. Notice how much more Immediate accessiblity has been granted to the content through this simple act. Content that was once diffuse throughout the subpanels of sears.com is now available front and center. This transports the home page from a glossy but confusing series of panels to an open and accessible map into the subsections of the site.

   This is NOT a complete map -- only up to four subsections have been featured, which is why the "more" link emphasizes the fact that there's more "there there". An Ajax blowout can highlight the entire contents of each section on rollover.

Other ways to organize options

Hiding options has its place and time. For instance presenting fields for billing AND shipping addresses strikes me as information overload for the 80% of people who live where they ship.

I much prefer having a chackbox option that allows me to "Enter a different Ship To Address" and fly out the secondary set of fields in that situation then to stare at twice as many fields as I need or want.

Also, in many cases, options are contextual, and are best displayed as a result of user activity -- for instance in a classic "Wizard" format. As long as the wizard is "Backwards navicable" (say with a growing tab at the top), a wizard can be a great way to organize options in a process, because it gives you ample visual space to blow out the options at each stage in the entire screen.