You know those new Dell commercials? You know, the ones where the customers are talking to the Dell salesperson on the phone. It turns out there’s a ton of truth to those. Well, that is that anyone wanting to buy a Dell is likely to get so frustrated that they’ll resort to calling instead of using their website, which is terrible. As one person tried to compare a Dell product to Apple’s offerings:
So. I wonder how it compares to a similarly configured 20″ iMac Core 2 Duo?
No problem. I’ll just click the “buy” but… Uh, no. There is no “Buy” button. There is a “Customize it” button. That must be it. No, wait, that pops up some kind of “home / business / government” selector. OK. “Home”.
Huh? Now the original window has been sent to some generic store entry. No indication of where I should go to find what I was just looking for. Even if I remembered the model name / number (the x2920asd A or whatever), there is no clue as to what I might click. Desktop? Laptop? No idea.
There you have it folks. Go to Apple’s store. There’s five models clearly laid out with pictures. Anyone remember Apple’s low point? Let me remind you, it was when they had dozens of models with an obtuse numbering scheme. Sound familiar?
[via Daring Fireball]
I don't really see how it's so hard to find what you want on the Dell website, but when you get there, Dell have changed their original form to a wizard type interface.
Rather than glancing down trhough the options, this means you have to click through about 30 screens to get to checkout, even if you're not changing the default configuration (you don't know if you're going to change the default configuration until you've seen all the options).
I'm a web developer, and one of the things we try to do is cut down on the number of clicks - this is really bad interface design.
I agree, their site is a little bit difficult to navigate. On the other hand their support is excellent... We use them at work and on the rare occation we have hardware issues, they have someone onsight fixing it sometimes on the same day.