Plagiarism (Sainsbury’s online groceries and Ocado)
Saying I was a bit shocked is putting it mildly. This week I was introduced to Sainsbury’s To You‘s ‘new’ website design, and my chin almost hit the floor. How can such a big company have the balls to blatantly copy just about every aspect of Ocado‘s website? Having been the only web/user interface designer at Ocado since the website was launched I know exactly how the Ocado website design evolved and where all the ideas have came from, and there really is nothing original about the Sainsbury’s To You design. Earlier this year Tesco‘s largely plagiarised Ocado too (even using some dubiously identical graphics), but Sainsbury’s have taken it one step further and really ripped-off the design completely.
I guess there are several ways of looking at this:
- The Ocado website design is perfect (which it isn’t) and can’t be improved (which it definitely can)
- Ocado is such a threat to other supermarkets’ online services that they are scared to do anything different to Ocado
- Sainbury’s To You and Tesco are lazy
- It’s a compliment
Thankfully the coding behind Sainsbury’s new site isn’t great, accessibility, speed and browser compatibility are still problems for them.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2005 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.