This is a slightly strange product. Firstly because it has a single credit card slot along it’s length. I’d say that this is a pretty edge-case situation that you might find yourself in—out with you iPhone and wanting to carry just one card with it.

Materials

Anyway, this aside, the case/pouch is very nicely made, the stitching is tight and the material is a high quality manmade suede fibre. So far, this seems to have cleaned up my phone a treat, but I have a feeling this won’t last as it gets used more. It feels nice to the touch and is extremely slim, so it doesn’t really transform the iPhone into a pillow or chunky wallet. The suede effect material does also want to bring the contents and lining of your pockets with it when you attempt to take it out.

Fit

The iPhone4 fits extremely well into the case, so well in fact, that it’s not really clear how you’re supposed to remove it. Personally, I have resorted to pushing the base of the phone out and crumpling the bottom of the case.

That pocket

Why on earth Cote et Ciel thought that this was a good idea is beyond me. Aside from the initial “why would you want that?” reaction, it’s also a really bad design decision because it puckers up (see image) and also doesn’t seem to really fit a credit card either. If I can, I’ll be glueing the slot down or the case will be going in the bin.

Conclusion

Cote et Ciel should really stop selling this product, as it’s definitely not up to the standard of their other cases. I’m feeling quite hard done by @ around £20.

Some of the best bits:

Smart trolley

Allows customers to get more of a handle on the shopping they are (or aren’t) going to buy. My favourite bit is the AJAX’d pictures view that shows quantities as multiple items.

Speed

From day one, we knew that buying groceries online was a fairly unique task for most users – with most visits resulting in around 50 products being added to a trolley. Speed is a key factor in making this a viable option for customers. Pages have always been as light as possible (in terms of HTML, numbers and weight assets, and simplicity of the DOM for fast rendering)

Catalogue navigation

In the latest incarnation (currently in beta testing at time of writing) the catalogue navigation has seen a huge overhaul and now uses meta data to drive structure. This has enabled us to create contextual navigation that allows the system to represent different modes (type, status, storage, lifestyle, who it’s for, brand) of decision making throughout the task of finding a product. This also works to make an interesting journey if users don’t exactly know what they’re looking for. There are many other advantages to this system which I’ll blog about another time.

Simple delivery slot booking

Slot (delivery time) booking has become inherently complex with multiple address functionality, variable pricing, variable thresholds and minimum delivery values, availability and green vans. Throughout these changes and additions we’ve managed to keep the process simple.

Simplicity

My goal with any design is simplicity at a very high level. This may sound like an obvious usability goal but refining any process or interface to its most minimal constituent parts at an early stage is something that often appears to be overlooked.

Accessibility

For the most part accessibility is EASY! However you have to think about it as a fundamental part of design and code creation — it’s a painful thing to have to tack on. I also think that it helps you make lots of the right design decisions. If you design with accessibility in mind I think this also helps avoid many obvious usability problems.

Making the customer the most important

Luckily this is something that’s been at the core of Ocado and the way it behaves towards customers is reflected in all aspects of the business (with the exception of some rather irritating radio ads). I never saw any resistance to changing things on the site purely to make users’ lives easier.

First Non-framed UK grocery site

This was a pet goal of mine for many years. Ocado used frames for a long time, for performance of ‘adding to trolley’ and the stable user interaction behaviour it provided. I never liked this even though I was fully understanding of the advantages it had. The semantics of having different pages in different states appearing as one, and the inherent problems and design issues this has meant that I was always aiming for a non-framed design that could offer the same performance.

Generally we try not to change the UI too much in one go, but the new features are entirely aimed at making shopping for groceries on Ocado more fun and at reducing the amount of reading required. One of the unique issues with grocery shopping is the number and variety of products that a customer will add to their trolley.

There are two major new views of the contents of a trolley to help customers see what they’re buying: [Pictures](http://www.flickr.com/photos/londonbrad/426746274/), and [Categories](http://www.flickr.com/photos/londonbrad/426745971/).

I couldn’t agree more with Tadeusz Szewczyk about the reasons he states about why Adobe® Flash is in demise. I’ve yet to see a ‘good’ website that is built in Flash. Invariably the message or reason for being is so pointless that it requires a song and dance to make it interesting. In nearly all cases a more suitable solution would be one static web-page which which can be scanned quickly by the user, and which gives as much information in the time it takes to work out what the designer has created and that you can’t be bothered to deal with it.

I find that it can be quite a compelling media-type when it’s embedded into web pages and when it is used to bring animation and audio to static content, but in using it, companies are being a little presumptuous that users actually give a shit enough to sit and watch the thing.

The idea of Flex is scary in that ‘someone’ must think that it’s a good enough idea to want to use it. What is the point of running an application framework within a perfectly capable existing one? I mean, I know why web agencies like to use Flash — because it tends to lock clients into the pain and cost of updating, but why do clients choose it? I guess the idea is that they love to have the total control over exactly how their product/brand looks and behaves regardless of the numerable negative effects this has on the user’s experience.

I generally tend to find Flash-based websites so obstructive to the point that they can be analogised by the scenario of going into a shop to buy something, but before I can get through the front door, a shop assistant – dressed in corporate attire and sporting a huge logo – blocks my way and does a song & dance in front of me proclaiming how wonderful the company is, whilst also telling visually impaired customers to ‘bugger off’. My point is, if the company is that wonderful, if the services they offer are compelling, interesting and great, I will see that for myself. I don’t need to be stopped and told that before I enter. Building a brand online is not just about looking cool and waving your logo in front of users’ faces, it’s about what you do and how you do it.

A reduced feature set, general information architecture and content for small devices also has the benefit of making the site perfect to use with screen reading software. Users are limited only by the fact that they don’t have category navigation (product search being the alternative), and customers will need to be already registered on the main Ocado site to be able to use this new service.

I really like that Adobe have tried to address the issue of working on sets of Raw camera files — which is something that is quite painful and time consuming in Photoshop™, but even though the software is currently in beta 3 (I presume this means it won’t differ much to the finally release) and currently free to use, I just can’t put up with how annoying it is. Having to constantly click between it’s three modes to do simple operations repeatedly, it’s lack of photoshop-style levels control – in favour of something it refers to as ‘Black’, makes it frustrating to use even after plenty of practice. Adobe® Lightroom™ also seems to use up more screen real estate with it’s pointless banner and annoying side-panel menus which even when hidden have a habit of springing back to life as you work through careless mouse gestures.

Until I can justify buying Apple’s Aperture, I’m going to have to stick to using iPhoto and shooting Raw more conservatively.

Anyway, we won in the e-commerce category which was quite impressive given the ommission of any other large companies from the list. I’m really pleased we did the accessibility work on ocado.com, the changes had minor cosmetic impact and have vastly improved search engine performance. I can’t see any downside to making your website accessible, I know it means that you have to actually understand HTML and the principles behind it and to not just think about how things look, but surely that’s not beyond reach of other large e-commerce sites?

“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.

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.