Brad Haynes / Blog

After nearly seven years of designing and coding ocado.com, I’ve decided that I really need a bit of a change creatively and logistically (living in East London and getting to the office in Hatfield was never ideal). Luckily Ocado has led the way in online grocery retail since it started trading and just about all the things we’ve implemented on the website over the years have become part of the vernacular in grocery site design.

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Ocado.com has some new features available to customers this week. The thing I’m most pleased with is the full-page trolley viewer, organising products and images to give users a more positive understanding of what they’re going to buy.

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Reading a very interesting blog posting about the demise of Flash, I was left with the question: Is Flash really in demise? I also wanted to add my thoughts as to why it should be.

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I’ve recently finished some work something called Ocado Lite, which is designed to cater for as many different browser platforms, devices and users as possible. Primarily, it’s reason for being is to allow customers with mobile phone web access to be able to create, modify, cancel or check orders.

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Creates great images and is better for managing sets of Raw digital images than Photoshop™, but totally lacks a useable user interface. I don’t think I’ve found a more unintuitive piece of software on OS X before, and yes that even include the rather dire Microsoft Office suite of applications.

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I was asked today what my design philosophy was. I must have one, I’m pretty opinionated and definite when it comes to design. But nailing down what exactly it is has proven to be a quite a challenge. I’d never considered myself outspoken enough to formulate and write down any philosophy I might have. So far I am pretty confident in falling into the category of Modernist with all the ethics that back it up, and a minimalist in terms of aesthetics, although perhaps not in terms of functionality. I believe that good design should be entirely fit for purpose, and should selflessly consider the user over aesthetics.

Last week Ocado picked up Visionary Design award from the NLB. I don’t really have any idea how many visually impared people use the website, but since we enforced a few rules and made the semantic markup more strict, it seems to work pretty well.

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Whilst doing some cross-browser testing, I fired-up Internet Explorer 5 for the mac (yes, it would be totally retarded to actually want to use this browser) and was seriously amused to see this messge as it downloaded the default msn.com homepage:

“Why does MSN look like this?
…If you are using Internet Explorer for Mac, we recommend that you use another browser to have an optimal experience on MSN.”

Microsoft default msn.com homepage

Let’s hope this means they aren’t going to write another crappy browser for the mac.

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:

1. The Ocado website design is perfect (which it isn’t) and can’t be improved (which it definitely can)
2. Ocado is such a threat to other supermarkets’ online services that they are scared to do anything different to Ocado
3. Sainbury’s To You and Tesco are lazy
4. 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.