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…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 at 6:31 pm and is filed under web UI. 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.