UI Fail: DELL Monitor Selection

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:11:00 -0800

DELL’s usually pretty good about maintaining a clean, non-confusing website. Heck, I suppose they have to since nearly all of their ordering is done from their website. So naturally, I was a bit suprised to find the following image selection menu used in their monitors portion of their website:

Link: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&category_id=4009&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

If your brain works like my brain does, when thinking of numbering systems you generally count from lower to higher. In my case, I was looking for a 21 inch monitor and my brain instinctively decided the first monitor on the left would be the area I needed to go to. On inspection, it’s really the second monitor in the middle.

For instance, if they wanted to be consistent… the ordering of the pictures should be the opposite.

Ahh…. that’s better.

In the above example the ordering for the monitors matches the numerical ordering for the category. 30” to 24” is large to small. The largest monitors category is on the left, and the smaller categories go to the right.

Still… my gut feeling is to actually change everything and make the numerical ordering go from smallest to largest. Like the following:

Sweet.

Though, I suppose one could rationalize the previous usage as well. Especially if DELL sells more 24” and larger monitors on their accessories pages than other models — then this would make sense, put the best selling group as the first group the user sees.

Either way, I think DELL chose the most non-intuitive, confusing version for the menu they currently show.

Happy Birthday Noah

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 21:15:28 -0800

After years of struggling to regularly blog… using everything from Livejournal to B2 to Wordpress… perhaps now is the time when it’ll all just come together and my blogging will reach the consistency I’d like.

After all, today’s the third birthday of my son Noah. It’s a great day to start.

Ambassador of Kwan

UI Fail: DELL Monitor Selection

Happy Birthday Noah