I think there's a real reason here which the article doesn't mention: the more confused you are about what you're purchasing, the more likely you are to pay more and get less.
If the site can guide you to last year's model without you realizing, then they profit. If it isn't easy to discover there's a similar laptop for the same price but a faster processor, then they profit.
A lot of consumers will give up trying to understand, and simply pick a more (overly) expensive one because it'll "have to" be good if it's that expensive.
This effectively allows manufacturers to achieve price discrimination: those who don't have time to research for hours will pay more, those who really don't have money will take the time and figure out the best deal in the end. (It's the same way grocery store coupons allow those who really need to save costs pay less, as long as they'll go to the effort of clipping.)
So why doesn't Apple do this?
Because Apple is by-definition high end. They're not going after bargain hunters, so they can afford a simple, cleaner site where everything is clear and comparable. They don't need to do price discrimination as much. (Obviously they still do though, it's just by charging way more for upgrades, like maximum-sized-storage iPhones and MacBooks.)
"the more confused you are about what you're purchasing, the more likely you are to pay more and get less."
"Don't ascribe to malfeasance that which can be otherwise explained by incompetence" - Napoleon.
Having worked in this area I would say it's simply a matter of zero product strategy, not some dark pattern. And I'm not sure I agree with the confusion bit though you could be right, I don't think so. Confusion is death to a sales funnel.
Here's a product, oh, let's make a variation, oh, another variation with this cool new thing our M&A team bought, oops, power regs mean in that other country we need this - so let's make another model. But Microsoft wants a specific hardware version for their OS, so 10 more version. Hey have you seen this new stylus (!?) Marketing says 10% of Millennial want them, let's tweak the screen and make 5 more models with that.
Basically, there's no product strategy.
The 'web site' is basically just taking orders from Product, and simply 'doing their job' by organizing it in some way ... which may include some douchy designers view on how it ought to be displayed.
Then Marketing Ops posts some vanity metrics and voila.
Someone with a lot of power has to go in there and change that, and otherwise, it won't happen.
If the culture is not there from the start, or from the top, it won't happen.
So I actually agree with you 100%... but in the sense that's it's working inadvertently.
I'm very familiar with internal politics/chaos resulting in an explosion of models... ;)
But the thing is: if this were hugely detrimental to the bottom line, it would get fixed. But it's not. To the contrary, it actually improves the bottom line, even if it wasn't designed to do so. So other things get fixed, but not this.
And if I'm shopping for a new <insert superfluous consumer item here> then sure, confusion is death to a sales funnel because I can just not buy. But if I need a new laptop and can't afford Apple, then I've got 3-5 brands to choose from and their websites/models are equally confusing...
...and so I probably wind up spending more money that I needed and the companies come out winners.
BUT... if another company comes along and goes after the value market with a simple-to-understand lineup, where the business model is massive, massive volume of a tiny number of models? And gains consumer trust? Kind of like Casper did with mattresses, another impossible-to-understand market? Or Warby Parker with glasses, where incumbents were waaay
overpriced? Well then there's a ton of money to be made, my friend. Indeed, I'm actually surprised it hasn't happened yet.
"if this were hugely detrimental to the bottom line, it would get fixed. "
The company I worked at didn't 'fix it' - they went out of business.
It would take an entire strategic overhaul to fix it - which is why these things keep happening.
I would take product line focus, brand communications, focused online retailing etc. etc.. That's hard to do most companies are incapable.
You'd be surprised at how inefficient so many operations are.
Who's going to put their hand up and say that it's broken? Or that they could fix it? Who's going to believe them? Does the company have the leadership and ability to even try an experiment? How would that work?
All of that takes thoughtful leadership across a few groups, which is sadly rare.
I think Amazon is a great example - there's so much clunkiness in their UI that I feel pretty confident some optimizations could be made. But it doesn't seem to compute in the way they roll their ops.
"It would take an entire strategic overhaul to fix it - which is why these things keep happening."
They could just ask for advice to whoever makes websites for semiconductor manufacturers and/or sellers: there's surely a lot of corporate blurbs in there but in a few clicks you also get to an easy to navigate matrix of products with filters to find exactly the needed part. It would become trivial for example to find a product with no less than x GB of RAM,SSD, that exact processor, x cells battery, xy sized screen, available in stock now etc. then sort the list by pricing.
The other not-that-nefarious explanation is that laptop brands with the exception of Apple tend to be not that great at merchandising their products. That's what retailers do really well. If selling direct to consumer is only a small fraction of overall sales, having a great consumer experience is strictly not a priority. If a lot of your sales come from corporate or academic IT departments, having a great catalog website for consumers is not a priority.
That's a great point. Banking UI's tend to be disastrous partly because banks think IT is for 'back office' - not part of the product. So it always mundane. Does the minimum.
It shouldn't be a shock that most of the people who buy something like Lenovo or current-day Dell are not individual consumers buying a single laptop. So the experience for individual consumers is not that great. Their best customers are IT departments ordering 200+ units at a time.
Go on Amazon, Newegg, B&H, eBay, or other higher quality computer retailers as an individual shopper and you will probably have a better experience buying any of the brands mentioned in the parent article. It might even be easier to buy direct from the manufacturer on eBay than it would be to use their own website and it's probably easier to get a Paypal refund than a refund through the manufacturer's own website.
One reason why Apple has had such incredible success in capturing market share is because they focused on creating a better direct to consumer experience. That is also why Dell had some great success when Apple stumbled in the late 1990s. They had an awesome eCommerce experience and great technical support.
You can hit MacBook Air -> Buy and the old non-retina model is on the same page as the new ones. You at least have to scroll down though, and comparing the features list makes it pretty clear that this is a cheaper old version.
I think there's a real reason here which the article doesn't mention: the more confused you are about what you're purchasing, the more likely you are to pay more and get less.
That could be true, but I also wonder how many people look at the weird bazaar that is the average website and then throw up their hands and buy Apple instead. Less hassle, etc.
If you have Apple money, you buy Apple (either for the performance/value or as a status symbol). It doesn't make sense to me that someone confused by a manufacturer's site would jump to Apple in disgust.
Anecdotally, most of my family doesn't have Apple money, so they send me Amazon and Best Buy links asking if a low-end Windows machine is worth the $250.
A few years ago I visited a large electronics retailer to buy a Windows laptop to put Linux on. I’d been a Linux user for years. But the service was so dire at the store I became irritated. No one knew what they were talking about. I waited twenty minutes to talk to a member of staff, who went to find another member of staff, and left me waiting an additional twenty minutes. I thought fuck this, left, and walked by an Apple store on the same street. I was curious and popped in to have a look. The experience was such a contrast that I bought a MacBook Air on the spot. Five years later and I’ve bought another MacBook, two iPhones, two iPads, and god knows how much software.
Seriously, this, but from the opposite direction. I've been an Apple user since forever, and I keep thinking about switching to Linux. But then I try to find some hardware, and it's either Thinkpad (the same price as Apple, plus I have to install an operating system?), Dell XPS (everyone here seems to hate it), or hunt through an endless forest of confusing bits of hardware with machines named things like EnterpriseCo D8305xr and BigCorporate fx9301.818 and through those terrible websites, and, fuckit, Tim Cook gets some more of my money.
Can’t speak from actually purchasing from them, but System76 laptops seems like a great option for getting a Linux computer. The website is in stark contrast to the maze that the Dell website is.
on the other hand looking to buy an ipad I have a choice between 6 "iPad" models, 4 "iPad mini", 2 "iPad Air" models and 4 "iPad Pro" models. Confusing and difficult to research anything.
Yes. I feel many people really look at the price in a very black-and-white sort of way. Truth is, if people really want the device in question, they do find a way -- and they do buy it.
I observed many times how even below-middle-class people around here in Eastern Europe could muster the money for a MacBook or a high-end iPhone with help from relatives or local short-term money lenders. (Sometimes from their boss as well -- many employers are happy to deduct 10-20% of your salary for 4-8 months until you repay the device.)
Also what you said about service is something that much of the tech crowd here in HN seems to severely underestimate. Even I as a programmer and a few other hardware guys I know appreciate a semi-informed employee who comes to us and answers intelligently any questions we ask them. Those that don't try and swindle us usually get our money.
Lenovo suffers from perpetual sale syndrome. I know they have varying sales, from 20% to 40% off or free upgrades, but I'm never certain the current offer is the best available, so I postpone purchasing to see if next week is better and usually forget to actually follow up. I'd probably have spent twice as much if they offered Apple like experience, where the price is the price.
Good luck ordering anything from Lenovo. For me, checkout failed after successful Visa verification. Support answers they don't know why and cannot help. Unacceptable for me if I do 1800€ purchases. Warranty terms are completely obfuscated.
Try to find an answer if your TP has world-wide support. You can't. It needs IWS International Warranty Service. TPs have that by default, people say, but during checkout it will tell you IWS is not applicable (because included? the IWS model number list will tell you, but do you have the correct model number during checkout?)
Lenovo has one of the worst laptop websites. They have 10 "series" currently on the site: the X, T, P, Yoga, A, E, L, 13, 11E, and V.
Given the number of configurable options across the product line for processors, memory, hard drives, screens, etc., there must be thousands of possible combinations.
I assume many laptops across all of the series are available with 13-inch screens, so the name of the "13 series" is particularly confusing.
so that 8GB option I considered to buy doesn't even have upgradeable RAM? Thank you for that page, it's incredibly helpful, also since I'm in a region without English website.
The configuration page lists the options like that:
8GB (4GB soldered + 4GB)
8GB
For me that implies the 8GB are configurable. What the fuck.
Yes, intentional confusion is a dangerous game in a competitive environment. Though I suppose these folks must have carefully gathered metrics to compare the profits they gain from the confusion (if there really are any) versus what they lose when people leave without buying.
I highly doubt this is the strategy. There is somebody in charge of experience design in these organizations who is doing their very best to make the site easy to use.
However, they are hampered by a confusing product selection (as mentioned in the article), marketing people who want to make sure their preferred items are prominently placed, tight timelines that don't allow for user testing, or legacy tech that restricts design options.
I'd say Apple's product lineup is no less convoluted.
Sure, the Apple site looks nicer, but the product lineup today is still pretty convoluted and it isn't easy to determine which is the 'right' option for you [1].
It's difficult at first glance to work out why the £949 MacBook Air would come with a 1.8 dual core, and the 'New' 13-inch would come with a 1.6 as standard.
Actually Apple used to be like all the rest before Steve Jobs came back. First thing he did was discontinue a lot of products, even entire categories like the Newton.
I think everyone should go to three categories: 13 inch laptops in good, better and best. Have a comparison chart that clearly shows the differences. Do not make you hunt to see the differences.
Then if you're making special models for say WalMart or Best Buy affix a letter code and then don't make it available through normal navigation. If I search for it on their site by entering the model number I can find it. Might even say something like 'as seen in Best Buy'.
Now this would result in fewer individual models and the absolute sales yield might drop temporarily. But by concentrating on customer satisfaction over time people would recommend them higher and their sales would increase.
One last thing - every single manufacturer in the checkout should have an option that says for $50 extra we won't load all the garbage you have to delete when you first start using the machine.
The terrible websites are just an inevitable consequence of their terrible product strategies. They make too many models, with extremely narrow differences from one model to another, and with all these products’ names just being long, easily confused alphanumeric strings. You can’t easily find the one model that’s best for you in all the noise of all the models that aren’t.
These companies desperately need someone to do to their product lines what Steve Jobs did to Apple’s back in the ‘90s — take a fire axe to them and chop away all the deadwood.
Their strategies certainly are terrible for the educated consumer. But might there be a method to their madness? For instance, if you believe customers:
1. primary buy based on price
2. buy from retail outlets based on that outlet's marketing
Then it might be reasonable to have a swamp of very similar models specifically so that customers can't easily comparison shop between different retail outlets. A deliberate 'dark pattern' if you will.
I have plenty of non-technical acquaintances and they gradually become more and more jaded as years pass. Most have settled for "everybody is producing garbage so just buy what's pretty and cheap" but some started to buy refurbished MacBook Airs and are very happy. I also knew a guy 2-3 years ago who adored his Asus EEE netbook.
So I feel that with these dark pattern sales techniques the companies are inflicting a death by a million paper cuts to themselves. But since the difference isn't visible quarter to quarter they are oblivious to it.
Terrible for the uneducated consumer. If you are heavily invested in buying a new laptop (spending $1,000 and enjoy researching laptops) then you stand to significantly benefit. Every uneducated consumer who buys an overpriced laptop subsidizes the cost for an educated buyer who heavily researchers and finds a good deal. Not fair to 90% of consumers, but most industries work this way.
Researching takes time. Nothing is free, especially not time. Time is money. Unless the savings is significant, it's likely all factors of economics considered, that both are paying about the same; getting the same value / bang for buck.
True, the higher end models might be more profitable to the manufacturer, but that's likely due to less competition at that end of tbe market. That doesn't make the higher end buyer more educated.
> Every uneducated consumer who buys an overpriced laptop subsidizes the cost for an educated buyer who heavily researchers and finds a good deal.
What economic motivation do laptop manufacturers have to compensate for uneducated consumers making particularly bad deals by offering models that are particularly good deals? It isn't a zero-sum game. What educated buyers are getting in this case are less-bad deals, especially because the retailer knows that if they hold the laptops long enough they can eventually sell them to an uneducated consumer. All buyers would benefit from easier quality comparison, although educated buyers would benefit less.
The law of averages isn't a law and there can be a market for lemons.
The fact that it's not a zero sum game is exactly why it would work. Laptop manufacturers are far from the only ones who use this and similar strategies. This permeates nearly every buying decision we make.
I suspect the answer is in the org structure of these large companies.
There are PM/s for the Spectre line of products, another for Pavilion,
another for Zbook, Envy, Workstation etc. The PMs report to separate corporate
silos with individual directors who have to show annual growth for their group
otherwise 'no bonus for you'. So each group ends up segmenting their respective
market in every way possible to try to maximize profit.
That how you end up with every possible combination of (display x cpu x memory x SSD x GPU x form factor) at every possible price point to be sold this quarter.
Not to mention old inventory that needs to clear out.
The corporate website is run by yet another internal web group that
collects product info from the various silos and outsources the actual web design
in a waterfall software development model to an outsourcing company in India.
Meanwhile the top VP just cannot cut through the process and complexity of
what he is managing and limits himself to pounding his fist on the table
when quarterly profits are in danger while plotting his next move up
the corporate ladder by jumping ship at the right opportunity.
I have spent tens of hours maintaining a spreadsheet for black friday deals on chromebooks, so I'm intimately familiar with this. Similar to the author, I would usually find the laptop I wanted, google "laptop name spec sheet" and skip the marketing page and go right to the technical page. The worst offendor is HP - their black friday deals page is brutal:
* Can't open links in new tabs
* No filter/sort options
* No copying and pasting of text
* Manually ajax button click to load more products
* Clicking through to a product then pressing back resets the previous page, so you have to scroll all the way down then click to load more results, two times
I almost excluded hp from my spreadsheet because it was so time consuming compared to other brands!
I know of a small branch office which has to buy HP laptops approved by the corporate HQ. So HQ decides on a small number of approved HP configurations for the next few months(I think normal, developer, mgmt). Then the branch offices goes to the HP site and selects how many of each it wants to have. In a recent redesign of the HP site, they can't even see what they are going to get: Has the 'normal' specification of this month 4 or 8 GB RAM? Who knows? If you phone your HP representative, they say they don't know, go ask HQ.
Then again, the laptops HP delivers are all shoddy quality. Every week, some key or whatever breaks off one of them. Getting a replacement part takes 2 or 3 months and sometimes the replacement part itself turns out to be damaged. Also, if you order a new laptop today, HP can't deliver them until next year. End users trying to get work done desperately cling to the old DELLs of 5 years ago, so HQ actually decided to forbid upgrading these DELLs to windows 10 in order to finally get rid of them and get some sales for HP.
These are excellent examples of problems which aren't explained by their claims that "All of it’s based off of user interactions data and information".
Which target market, exactly, do they think benefits from a product website which stops you from opening a product link in a new tab? I'd love to see some data which supports that.
I can imagine some twisted data-driven logic. Bad ux -> difficult to compare -> users more often purchase the first few devices they look at -> design site with bad ux and expensive products at the top of the page
I found the new HP driver download site is similar to your description. It changed a couple of years ago and I find it horrible to use and incredibly frustrating. You can't look at a driver then go back to the same page layout, I think it does the search again and leaves the sections minimised.
ESET downloads is similar, it used to be just a list and each one had a download link. Now for each product you need to select a couple of dropdowns to get the correct file version, tedious and annoying.
I think it's just the way web design is going, they are removing functionality and turning it into something that looks like a two year old child's colouring book. Generally the amount of information has been reduced, and what little websites do publish is buried.
I just bought a laptop on Wednesday via Lenovo's site. It was a disaster all around. Plenty of others have already mentioned how bad the UX and search are, but I had a bunch of technical problems as well.
* Zip Code field didn't work unless I disabled my browser plugins (which don't cause problems elsewhere).
* Terms & Conditions links went to the 404 page.
* You can't sign up for an account until after you complete a purchase, and the cart doesn't persist between browser sessions (which wouldn't have helped anyway, since it only worked in incognito mode).
* The post-purchase signup form was broken, so now the only way I can track my order is from the Order Status link in the receipt email, and that page is a static information page, not connected to an account, with no interactive tracking.
I'll also second what others have said about how they have way too many models and it's hard to figure out what to buy in the first place.
I still bought one, though, because they make solid machines and everything was 30-40% off.
It's interesting because we were just discussing this around the Thanksgiving table yesterday. My mother says she has been thinking of buying a laptop for a year and spent time online but has no idea. My mother-in-law said that she is fed up with trying to figure out what to buy. My son, who is tech-savvy, says that he couldn't decide between like 10 different ones because they were all just a tiny bit lacking to decrease the price of their individual models, but put all the good stuff together and it costs a thousand bucks more.
So, yes, navigating the websites is not making this any easier.
And myself, I had literally no advice to give them. How would I know either?
Since most laptop makers have terrible product design in general, should it be surprising that their websites are any different?
The source of this problem on their sites for me has been the sheer number of different models that many of these manufacturers are putting out. I get that they're chasing different markets, but even then it is still somewhat baffling.
Microsoft has the right idea in not just copying some of Apple's product design, but also the simplicity of their product line up. (Which I admin certainly would be easier for Microsoft, since they were starting from nothing.) But has any major laptop manufacturer simplified their lines in this way?
Not at all a reason to keeping being an Apple customer after their failures in the last few years, but one thing that I miss from using Apple is their minimalist, easy-to-understand product line.
Right after selling my Late-2016 MBP in a hurry I went shopping for a new laptop, had to pick between XFT-799 and LL-3A. I have no idea why they do it.
Besides idiotic names, I really dislike browsing by use. What does it mean for a laptop to be "for the office" vs. "for programming" vs. "for home"!!? Still a mistery to me.
Because Lenovo, Dell, Hp, and Dell(it's changing since the XPS era) look down into direct to customer sales. The corporate divisions are the one paying the bills, and they will likely continue to be paying. They are used to offload entire production batches directly into big consumer retailers, and any new self-lead sale is more a problem than anything else.
I once made a corporate purchase with Dell, and it was an Amazing experience. They replaced any defective laptop in hours, now try your luck with their online customer support.
If someone from Dell is reading this, please help yourself setting up a decent store for the Precision and XPS brands.
Lenovo‘s website was very frustrating when trying to buy a T480s; weird navigation and a configuration wizard that crashed sometimes. Mostly, though, they give you a model ID and if you put it in the “Model ID” search box, it yields nothing and additionally empties the shopping basket, so that you have to start over.
I eventually bought it from a local store, but if I didn’t know that I wanted a Lenovo, I would have given up and bought something else.
I’m not sure who actually buys from their website. I’ve tried to use it in its various incarnations over the years and it’s been terrible every single time. I think perhaps they mainly sell direct to corporates and to retail channels so the site isn’t something they care about getting sales from.
I recently bought a A485 from their site. It was only available in stock configuration from other sites which I didn't care for. The experience wasn't too bad, but maybe I was lucky.
I love how when you go to the checkout page on Lenovo's website, you can see a list of what is included. But if you look closely enough, you can notice that the check-marks are actually square root symbols. Such attention to detail XD
This is a huge reason why I now have a 100% Apple device stack. The older I get, the less time I want to spend researching what to buy (phones, laptops etc.). Apple gives me enough choice, but not too much. Also, when whatever I have gets obsolete, it’s almost (looking at you MBP team :P) guaranteed there will a good upgrade available.
Costco's website is terrible too. I think they could sell a lot more product if they had high resolution images. Ya, images (plural). They only have one image for each product! They're very low resolution. There is very limited information for each product. They're doing themselves a disservice since they have good prices.
Car manufacturers are the same. Trying to answer a question like "what's the cheapest trim that has features x,y,z" is very difficult on most. The brochures you can get at the dealership are sometimes helpful with that (though options packages make it hard again), but online is a different story.
Car manufacturers typically don't have that much flexibility in options really. If you're asking the question "what's the cheapest with features x,y,z" the answer is very likely the most expensive version, because one of your features happens to only be found in the most expensive version.
The next most likely response is that there is no model that fits your critera, because you're mixing high end features with low end features. If you want mag wheels but cloth seats from the manufacturer you are SOL. You want the high performance engine and the manual gearbox that isn't an option either, the manual gearbox is only for the poverty model with the 1970s engine that we still make but stopped improving 20 years ago. Also it has manual windows.
And the CarPlay/Android auto head unit (so you don't have to deal with their junk navigation) only comes in the "old money" (new money) model with wood details, analog clock... they may as well add wing back chairs and a fireplace.
Actually took a screen shot [0] of Lenovo's site yesterday [1].
I really need to replace this 4th-gen iPad. Hence my looking for other portable devices. On the ipad.
20 years ago, I worked for a company that was rolling out this new e-Commerce technology for a Pets.com competitor. The site looked fantastic on the design group's $10,000 Macintoshes. We even had a testing lab with a couple of low-end PCs running Windows 95, 640x480, 64-color (IIRC) Windows palette. That literally looked like vomit, or random noise. Slow random noise. For our target customer computers.
My other explanation is that they are used to sell their products on stores and the OEM market and not so much online, so their strategies may be unaligned.
Wow, what a terrible article. The tl;dr comes down to this -
> Why are these websites bad? Well, I'm a journalist, so I
> asked the companies themselves! This is what they told me:
>
> > We provide our customers with lots of confusing choices,
> > and because of this our websites have to take into account
> > every possible customer with every possible need, so we
> > have to provide a mediocre experience to all of them, and
> > we can't possibly be 'pretty'.
>
> Well, folks! There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth.
> Can't argue with that. Here's something an expert in the field
> said that vaguely confirms what the companies told us [...]
>
> So, really, it's not your fault as a user when you can't
> navigate labyrinthine these sites. It's just a problem with
> humanity. Well, actually it is your fault, if you are a
> member of said humanity. But really, the websites just suck.
> [End of story]
This simply concedes that designing solutions to complex problems is limited to mediocre solutions, 'cuz it's hard!
Have you ever been to the McMaster-Carr website? Every time I visit, I am absolutely amazed by the quality of the user experience.
They have thousands, possibly tens or hundreds of thousands if you count variations, of unique products. Yet I can find exactly what I'm looking for with 3 clicks.
There are solutions to these problems. It's doing everyone a disservice to disregard that and let companies with lazy (or bad) design off the hook. As others have said, perhaps the goal of the design is actually to keep customers confused. We make it too easy to write it off as 'bad design' when it may in fact be underhanded design.
The first sentence of the article is a run-on, contains an inappropriate “and”, and omits a necessary word. I’m not convinced that Gizmodo should be judging anyone for being “terrible”.
Pro-tip: a "run-on sentence" is not one that contains multiple clauses that could be edited to be different sentences; it's one that is multiple sentences, strung together with no punctuation and no transition. A sentence is not a run-on sentence just because the reader lacks the attention span to read more than a line or two at a time.
If the site can guide you to last year's model without you realizing, then they profit. If it isn't easy to discover there's a similar laptop for the same price but a faster processor, then they profit.
A lot of consumers will give up trying to understand, and simply pick a more (overly) expensive one because it'll "have to" be good if it's that expensive.
This effectively allows manufacturers to achieve price discrimination: those who don't have time to research for hours will pay more, those who really don't have money will take the time and figure out the best deal in the end. (It's the same way grocery store coupons allow those who really need to save costs pay less, as long as they'll go to the effort of clipping.)
So why doesn't Apple do this?
Because Apple is by-definition high end. They're not going after bargain hunters, so they can afford a simple, cleaner site where everything is clear and comparable. They don't need to do price discrimination as much. (Obviously they still do though, it's just by charging way more for upgrades, like maximum-sized-storage iPhones and MacBooks.)