[exhaze]

I think is article is written from an eng/design perspective and thus fails to address business realities.

Example: “product pages are way too long”

Product pages are long because longer pages tend to perform better at SEO. Furthermore, at least in my experience, longer product pages don’t actually have a significantly negative impact for on-site conversion rates.

Sure, maybe a better global maximum exists, and every once in a while a startup finds it and achieves great success.

However, that kind of “bet the farm” mentality should be very intentional, not just based on design best practices, because in reality, companies live and die by their balance sheet, not by their UX best practices.

This got a bit rant’y, but I just wanted to provide this counterpoint. I’d love to hear what others have to say - I feel this is such a complex, nuanced topic…

[mbauman]

> Product pages are long because longer pages tend to perform better at SEO

If you own the category, however, folks will go directly to you instead of Google. I'm not googling for a 8-32 button head sheet metal screw.

[exhaze]

Totally agree.

But then it’s more like brand-driven marketing - people literally typing your URL into their browser.

Brands take a long time to build.

New companies don’t have a brand so they kinda have to go at it along the SEO route, especially in the early days.

[TeMPOraL]

I don't know how to describe it succinctly, but I find there to be a stark category difference between what the article talks about and what you mention. In particular, the former is what I appreciate as a user, the latter is what I hate.

> Furthermore, at least in my experience, longer product pages don’t actually have a significantly negative impact for on-site conversion rates.

That's probably because e-commerce stores aren't commodity. The user is going to convert anyway, even if they hate every minute of the experience.

[chefandy]

It's the design musings of a non-designer who barely considers the actual discipline of design, let alone marketing. "This site suits my immediate needs best it must be best," is as good of a design practice as a naive non-developer slapping together some PHP and saying "well it runs great for me on my laptop so it must run great everywhere else."

Someone who'd name a potentially customer-facing piece of software "Medusa" probably isn't considering users needs nearly as much as they assume. If a non-technical user saw an error with the word "Medusa" in it pop up on a website they just handed their credit card info to, even if things go fine, that's going to generate a lot of anxiety. On the business side of things, stuff like that actually matters.

[s-video]

This is what crosses my mind and bugs me whenever I see an article like this. As much as I hate the Amazon-style pages, I understand they're like that because that's what their business is, and that saying everyone should do it like McMaster is pretty futile.