We released two and a half updates to TAB this week, our biggest push so far this year. Some design notes:

TAB T-shirt Shop

The E-commerce system is a familiar design problem for web designers. Though there are still plenty of sites that get it wrong, sensible conventions have been in place for a while. Still, when it came time to design this years TAB t-shirt shop, we took the opportunity to explore what else e-commerce could look like.

First, we did away with the shopping cart page, instead, using the right column of the site to handle the entire transaction, save a brief detour for PayPal users. Each step of checkout, which on Amazon would be a separate page, is handled using some light AJAX.

Visually, our checkout takes the offline metaphor literally, with large, plastic-wrapped product thumbnails appearing on a pixel-idealized conveyor belt, inspired by American supermarket checkout lines. The reference was lost on our Japanese users during testing (there are no conveyor belts in Japanese stores), but since it didn’t interfere with their ability to purchase a shirt, we went with it anyway.

Admittedly challenging user expectations of how familiar, critical tools should look is a risky indulgence. It required and will continue to require careful testing and refinement. In the past, it would have been hard to take the same risk with clients, who usually value predictablity over innovation, but as AQ settles into its third year, with more experience, confidence and programming power, some of our clients trust us enough to take these risks together on the way to something a little more special.