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Why again is the milk at the furthest point from the front door in a supermarket? Hummmm?
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Why indeed. There are a lot of good points made. Let's take a practical example and separate basic common sense (not putting unwrapped bread on the floor) and more advanced design topics.
The point of the article is usability is one of several elements. Take milk or canned soup. Now I have read that when you stack the canned soup in alphabetical order, you sell X amount. Stack the cans out-of-order and you get a 30% increase in sales.
Put the milk -- or the quick stop items in the back of the store -- and sales go up. This is called merchandising, and many of the principles of desirability are counter to what you would normally call usability. For more about this, read Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy."
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We all know that grocery stores put the milk and bread in the back of the store to make us shop the entire store before getting to the stuff we really want and need.
-- Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping - Paco Underhill
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Physical stores practice visual merchandising. The tool they use is called a planogram. Online stores could use such diagrams -- but don't.
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Check out any well-known chain, such as 7-Eleven or Target, and you'll quickly realize the product-positioning pattern repeats itself in every store. If you were to place a price on such a planogram, it would be worth millions. The planogram is the most potent tool available to retailers who wish to increase their conversion rates.
But, hey, hang on! If brick-and-mortar retailing values planograms so much, then think about the Web. How might the online planogram look?
-- Webogram Power, Part 1
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Turns out when you analyze site sales, patterns emerge. And you'll find product selection on a page also determines how much sales of each product you get.
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Like most retailers, PETCO assumed that the best way to showcase the products on a category page was to use a shotgun approach: lots of thumbnails on the page to show the breadth of products. Wrong again.
That time, we learned that picking one or two products and showing a larger, more attractive photo converted visitors to buyers at a faster rate than the thumbnails.
-- Why Your Site Doesn't Need to be Pretty
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Looks, matter but not the way graphic artists want it to. ...And not the way usability people expect. Yes, of course people have to find the site and the products -- nobody is saying you shouldn't do the fundamentals. However, being in business is about competitive advantages, not bare minimums.
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A planogram is a blueprint given to store operators of what items go where in a store. The purpose is to help improve overall sales and make optimal use of consumer traffic patterns. By creating business rules that optimize margins and inventory turns on key pages of a Web site, like home pages, popular paid search landing pages, and checkout pages (this, in effect, is what a Webogram would do), online retailers could be capturing incremental gains that will help sustain the eCommerce industry's double-digit annual growth for years to come.
-- Forrester Reseach Retail FistLook
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Again, selling horses that aren't dead isn't the path to success. They're supposed to be alive, that's not a point of argument. But it's also not getting anyone to do business with you. So don't start slapping yourself on the back just because you put in TITLE and ALT tags and your page is SERP friendly. I'm not disrespecting SE positioning, I'm also not making
SEO the be-all and end-all many have.
What I am talking about are ecommerce patterns that are a level beyond simple usability. I'm talking about a simple CSS change that produces a 389% increase in response. Not a word of text changed, mind you -- pure design.
My criticism of the article which starts this thread is these guys tear into usability, but fail to propose the "path to success" which follows usability as a path to failure. Desirability design is that path to success.