Docked Shopping Cart
October 29,
2005 |
|
Synopsis: A real improvement
in the online shopping cart has been created by http://www.panic.com/goods,
by applying a simple concept that has been present in varying
degrees in all programs, ever since the command line disappeared...
docking instead of dialogs.
Thanks to a post on the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) (http://ixda.org/) discussion
group, I want to share with you a design idea that is sure
to prevail over time. And it's amazing how simple the idea
is, simply docking the shopping cart and
supporting drag-and-drop. Here's a picture:
That's it. Do it. Get used to it. Everyone will be doing it
eventually so I put it in my
Function Tree. The only curious
part---or is it?---is that the site is apparently just a T-shirt
sideline
of a software
shop,
not
a substantial
e-commerce juggernaut. Great work, and thany you Panic! But
I do have...
Some Comments
Panic's docked cart is a fascinating statement about the
craft of user interface design and the software industry's
dynamics:
1) On the one hand, it represents simply applying a trend
in UI design that
has been unstoppable: "docking" more and more controls.
Whether you call
them palettes, docked panels, or non-modal windows, this is
all they've
done. (That is: There was a time when, in graphics editors,
you had to open
and close a dialog for every color change. Now the color swatches
stay on
the screen all the time if you want... docked.)
2) Yet they thought of it first, so they still deserve tremendous
credit.
3) And why did it take 11 (?) years of the web of the web
to dock a shopping
cart... in an industry that we think moves fast? One reason
shows up if you
look under the hood. It's not meant as a slight on MS, just
a comment on
complexity and industry tradeoffs:
<!-- This bizarre chunk of magic IE CSS conditional code
is an attempt
to get IE to display our floating cart div properly. Hopefully,
future
versions of IE will natively understand position: fixed, and this can
go away.
Source: http://devnull.tagsoup.com/fixed/ -->
4) If we teach highschool programmers when to dock things,
we will have
extracted the right moral from the http://ixda.org/ thread
and served our craft well. Now as
long as Panic doesn't think that the mere notion of docking
itself (as
opposed to their code) is protected by their patent claim...
<!-- PanicGoods Product Page v1.0 -->
<!-- (C) 2005 Panic, Inc. / Cabel Sasser -->
<!-- Patent Pending --> |
