Post ALfZZq84lpTrDSD5Qe by temporal@mastodon.technology
(DIR) More posts by temporal@mastodon.technology
(DIR) Post #ALfZZn3iBbCth393i4 by temporal@mastodon.technology
2022-07-20T00:16:41Z
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Late-night #UI / #UX #rant.Even my SO, who's a competent computer user, but neither a techie, nor someone with STEM background, has been slowly coming around to my point of view: that almost all #ecommerce platforms have garbage UIs, that would be much better replaced by a generic spreadsheet or database browser UI.It feel like even the big brands don't want us to spend money with them. The pain is growing, as the market seems to consolidate behind few shitty storefront frameworks.
(DIR) Post #ALfZZo9m6XeR68zPnc by temporal@mastodon.technology
2022-07-20T00:20:55Z
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I won't even talk about design trends that waste screen space, showing 2 products in a space where 20 could fit. I'm used to working around this with userstyles.No, in recent months, I haven't seen an e-storefront with working *filters*. They're either absent, limited to irrelevant features, or have huge problem with data normalization.E.g. we've tried to buy some clothes on-line today. We ended up deciding to visit physical stores of the same brands instead, all because of broken filters.
(DIR) Post #ALfZZp9oNtH6CY0xUm by temporal@mastodon.technology
2022-07-20T00:25:38Z
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Take a shirt. The most important parameter to filter early on is size availability. To ensure good fit, sizing is usually given as 2 or 3 numbers (or enums).In a sane universe, you'd expect to be able to filter by either each of those numbers individually, or at least by triplets (there aren't that many combinations available).So this one well-known local brand had a size filter that consisted of a list of checkboxes for... every number separately, and every pair, and some triplets.
(DIR) Post #ALfZZq84lpTrDSD5Qe by temporal@mastodon.technology
2022-07-20T00:29:05Z
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What I mean is, take a triplet "A10, B20, C15", where A, B and C are different measurements. This brand's size filter was just a list like "10, 20, 30, 40, 15, 23, 31, 10/20, 30/10, 10x30x10, ...".That is, you couldn't even tell which measurement any of the numbers given apply to.This is something I see almost daily now, e.g. with sizes of various household equipment. And the common pattern of breakage suggests there may be a common broken process, or broken software, underneath.
(DIR) Post #ALfZZr2nMwqo3MkNpw by temporal@mastodon.technology
2022-07-20T00:32:03Z
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At this point I'm considering to start writing low-key scrappers that I could unleash on sites of interest, so they'd slowly crawl the subcategories I plan to look into over couple of hours, and collect data from product detail pages (which usually are more normalized) into an SQLite database, which I could then query independently.Or maybe such projects already exist? I can't be the only one who finds the current on-line shopping experience to be absurd?