Week Two | PICINI

Ok so this is for late credit, but here goes.

I chose the site Threadless because it's my favorite shirt website. The big thing about this website is that the shirts are designed by random people. Basically anyone can make a design and send it in, and if it's good enough the website will sell t-shirts with your design (and other variations of clothing as well). Because the website is a casual, amateur site, it's important that it's setup is non-threatening and relaxed. The fonts are quirky and the shopping cart option is shown by a cartoon of a smiling shopping cart instead of just type. While this may seem childish to some, I think it relaxes viewers into a less business-like mentality and makes the website less threatening. Also, the pictures that display the shirts show ordinary people modeling the designs. The models chose their own poses and sometimes wear outlandish accessories or facial expressions to convey the idea of the design. I don't always love this, because sometimes the people do really random poses that they think represent the design and I get distracted trying to figure out what they're doing instead of looking at the shirt, but regardless I think it's a good way of getting people to let their guards down, relax and feel at home enough on the site to spend ridiculous amounts of money. The reason I think this website is so user-friendly is because of the groupings you can use to shop. In case the picture isn't big enough to tell this, shirts are grouped by guys and girls across the top, and then size, price and color along the left bar. It's a very good setup and is made so the options of categories pop off the page, drawing your attention to them if you need help organizing. Since clothing catalogs can get overwhelming easily, this is incredibly useful.

I think this is very indicative of our culture today, because easy utility is an important factor in business. With thousands upon thousands of options out there, users won't waste their time trying to decode a difficult site, they'll move along to the next. The end.