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Inform the user about the differences

I just thought I would share a good experience I had today :)

Many websites today are divided into sections – some even exist in different versions that the user has to choose from.

If you visit the Dell website (and many others!) you are asked to make a choice of whether you are shopping for items for “Home & Home Office”, “Small Business”, “Medium & Large Business” or “Government, Education & Healthcare”. I’ve always found this choice frustrating. Not that I don’t know the size of my company, but if I click on “Small Business”, will I then only be presented with a select list of computers or do I get to chose from their whole stock?

In situations like the one I just described above it would be nice if the user could have access to a short description of the differences between the different versions or sections. BBC does this very nice on bbc.co.uk:

bbc.co.uk describing its different versions

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This entry was posted by Thomas Watson Steen on Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 18:06 (GMT-1) and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Inform the user about the differences”

  1. Hemanshu Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 18:36 (GMT-1)

    A very interesting observation… I might blog about this too, after a little bit of research :)