As part of a recent health kick, I’ve started eating a lot of Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter. Although natural peanut butter has a decent amout of fat, its low in saturated fat and contains absolutely no trans fat, so its basically all mono and poly fats (the good kind). It also has no cholesterol and is high in protein and fiber. But I digress — The reason I’m bringing it up here is to discuss the poor usability of the packaging of this product (and basically all natural peanut butter products).

For the unfamiliar, one must stir natural peanut butter before eating it, as the oil naturally seperates to create a messy goup. It is, however, virtually impossible to stir thick peanut butter without spilling it all over the outside of the jar and the counter. (Come to think of it, I have a similar problem with sesame tahini that I use to make hummus.) I’ve tried keeping the jar upside down for a day or two, pouring out the oil before stirring and then slowly bringing it back in, and even taking a bunch of the PB out into another container before stirring, but each time I’ve ended up with a total mess. I’ve tried to stir with a knife, a spoon and a wooden spoon, but still ended up greasy. I’ve also learned that if it isn’t stirred correctly the first time, the PB gets extremely dry by the end of the jar.

So, how can this be improved? Skippy did just release a “non-stir” natural PB, but it contains added sugars and oil so I’ve decided to stay away from that. I do think that a larger jar (or less PB) would help a lot — if there was some space between the top of the contents and the top of the jar, the problem would be alleviated greatly. (I’m sure, however, that this would cost the producers more money and is thus unlikely to happen.) Perhaps there is a specialized implement that could be created to stir the PB effectively? I’d buy it.

Anyone else have any great ideas? In the meantime I’m going to go have a snack…

Every year my company (a multi-channel eCommerce co.) invites some of our customers to a tradeshow style event, which features mostly vendors showcasing new, upcoming products, giveaways, etc. At this event we have a “.com” booth where we teach customers about how to use the website, showcase new site features, etc.

Last year, a lot of the customers who attended were not that familiar with the site — either they didn’t use it or had only used it sparingly. We had a great time showing them how easy and great it was to use, and the response was overwhelmingly good. Most people walked away from our booth really excited about using the site in the future.

This year — same event, same concept, mostly different customers — there was a noticable difference with the people who came by our booth: almost every single person used the site regularly and was familiar with most of the features. It was very difficult to find someone who didn’t know all about the site and who was blown away by our great features (they certainly haven’t gotten any worse, but these people now use them every day).

Our customers tend to be a little less tech-savvy than your normal blog-reader, but it is amazing to me how in the past year their knowledge of our website had changed. Its almost as if last year the web, at least to many of our customers, was this new thing that was just starting to catch on, and this year it is something that is just part of everyday life.

For me, of course, the web has been part of every day life for almost 10 years, but I’ve struggled to see others accept it the way I have. The difference from last year to this year in our customers really drove home the point that it is finally being accepted by those people who might have taken a little longer to realize the power and importance of the internet.

There was a big hubub in the eCom world about Gap, Inc. shutting down three huge websites, Gap.com, BananaRepublic.com and OldNavy.com for two weeks in order to completely overhaul the site. (In fact, they’re still shut down for most users.) Many experts wondered how huge sites like that could simply shut down, and rightfully so. Even if what they were doing completely took some servers out of service, it seems that a multimillion dollar company like The Gap should have the resources to keep their old site running while they prepared for the new one.

Despite all this, the new site really does have some nice new features. Much of it looks like flash, but isn’t — a trend that should have Macromedia a bit nervous. Although some of this new navigation can be a bit klunky and slow to respond at times, their new design is in many ways far ahead of the eCommerce norm.

The most intriguing new feature is QuickLook, a technology that allows the customer to view a larger image and details of any product from the gallery page without having to visit another page. A “QuickLook” button appears when the user rolls over the product image, and clicking it brings up a layer on top of the page with all the details. Nicely, the user can easily add the item to their bag from this step.

I love the idea of showing the customer this detail quickly and eliminating the “product detail” page from the process — Gap has quickly established a new standard for showing more details about a product. I do think, however, that there is room for improvement. Firstly, the QuickLook button can be a little slow to appear, and sometimes didn’t appear at all for me until I rolled off and then back on the image. In addition, there is nothing that suggests that this feature is available until I roll my mouse over the image. Perhaps having a button (or other cue) there all the time would help less-savvy customers find this great feature.

The new shopping bag is great — ever present in the top right corner, it pops down when a new item is added. The trick with shopping carts has always been to give the customer accurate feedback that the item has indeed been added without distracting them from what they were doing. The popdown is impossible to miss, yet is easy to remove to continue shopping.

Lastly (of the major changes), the traditional dropdowns for color/size have been revamped as little boxes, clearly showing the customer at one glance which items are available. (When the size is hovered over, the available colors change dynamically). This interface carries across the QuickLook, Product Detail and Shopping Cart pages for easy access to modify this information at any step along the way.

This is obviously just a cursory look at Gap.com’s redesign, but from that I’d say they’ve made some great improvements. Now if that shirt I wanted hadn’t sold out…