I’m starting a series of posts to catalogue random pieces of design which cause problems in usability. Things that are more complicated than they need to be, and which make you go ‘uh… what should I press here?’ or simply ‘what is that meant to mean?’.
First to be called out: Aberystwyth Student Union online shop.
As with many online shopping systems, they want to offer for sale items which they don’t have a picture of (or haven’t bothered taking one yet). That’s not such a crime. It is better to have the ability to buy it at all.
They have made a place-holder to indicate that there is no image of this product. Again, no problem here. If kept simple then it does no harm.
But this is what they have done:
Non-british visitors may not recognise this, but the grey part is not just any old camera. It is a road traffic symbol for a speed camera. So, it is used on roads to warn drivers not to exceed the speed limit, or they may get a fine.
In their wisdom, Aberystyth Guild then combined it with a red, crossed-through circle. That’s a pretty universal way of saying ‘not permitted’. It doesn’t mean ‘not available’. Rather, it means ‘you might want to do this, but you are not allowed to’. You get it on age-restricted products like films, or to prohibit smoking. It doesn’t mean ’sorry, there are no cigarettes available here’. It means ’smoke a cigarette here and you may be in trouble’.
Combine the red crossed circle with another symbol (in this case the cigarette) and you show that the other symbol is prohibited.
So this image in an online shop symbolises the strange situation of banning speed-cameras. You may not test the velocity of an ‘I love Aber’ mug on this web page. They must have had problems with this.
Solution: Use a place holder image with the words ‘no image available’. Like Amazon do:
More optimistically you could claim that the image will be ‘coming soon’ as Play.com does.
But that is probably a lie, as that placeholder will most likely be there for as long as the product is. After all, if the shop cared much about the sales of that product, they would get a picture of it when they first offer it for sale. Amazon’s simple statement, rather than a promise, is more honest and accurate.
Or you could just have a pale grey picture-frame symbol. I can’t find a good example of that as I write, but if you see one, let me know and I’ll add it here.
A very fair point!
The thing is though Sam, even when shops do use images, I find that they often use images that are far too small!
A 125px x 125px product image is not large enough! :) I like at least 500px x 500px to be able to see what I am buying.
Dan
Dan Harrison
December 7th, 2009