From Designing Websites For Every Audience by Ilise Benun How Design Books, January 2003

Ongoing design makeover, shift to product-oriented focus

Ashford.com, The Company

Ashford.com, one of the first luxury e-tailers, started as an internet company in 1998. Although the company has since built a small retail store in Houston, TX over 98% of their business comes from e-commerce. The bricks & mortar store used by local customers is much like a regular jewelry store, except that it has computer terminals available for browsing the full selection of products on Web site.

The Site

When it launched in 1998, Ashford.com featured only high-end watches. Jewelry, diamonds, writing instruments and handbags were added in 1999.

Ashford.com has been redesigned three times since 1998 and each time, according to Jeff Walker, Creative Director for the site, there has been a clash of sorts between the marketing, technology and creative departments. The conflict begs the question: "Is a homepage meant to be for advertisement, navigation, and branding, or is it a storefront or display case?"

This is a very common dilemma. The marketing department feels that every new promotion needs to shout louder than the last (which may still be on the page), so the featured product is overwhelmed by headlines, buttons and logos. The technology department needs to establish a stable, templated platform to manage the large amount of data (images, text, prices, descriptions) required for a large and constantly expanding e-commerce site, so the aesthetics and branding so carefully cultivated by the creative department get undermined.

"It wasn't until the third redesign that we got the balance right," says Walker. "This makes sense in retrospect. When the site was in the hands of marketing and then technology, merchandising and retail decisions were being made by engineers and media buyers. That's like giving responsibility for marketing a luxury department store's products to the foreman of a construction crew."

The Users, Their Goals and Their Tasks

The users (or customers) of Ashford.com are middle- to upper-income, mature people who can afford nice things and don't care about shopping in high-end department stores. Jeff Walker says, "They can shop in both Wal-mart and Neiman Marcus." Some of them are Internet-savvy, and some are not. And while some log on from a dial-up connection at home, Ashford.com's data shows that eighty percent of their orders occur between ten a.m. and four p.m., indicating that people are in the office on a broadband connection when they purchase the product.

When Walker joined Ashford.com in 1999, the site was pretty tradional: previous homepages featured lifestyle images with very little product; visible product pages featured tiny thumbnail images with lots of editorial and sales text.

Ashford.com has come a long way since then, as Walker has made it his priority to shift the focus gradually away from the text-heavy editorial format of the early iterations. The most recent iteration features a bright, crisp design that is completely product-focused and that stands apart form the cluttered, busy, hard-sell format favored by many e-commerce sites.

Goals of the Redesign

Because of the site's product focus, the over arching design challenge is to convey a sense of luxury while maximizing limited screen space. To do that, Ashford.com depends on high-quality images, which--yes, it's true--made the pages download slowly. Download speed is important, but since this site is all about product, the company decided to sacrifice those users with dial-up connections (for them it will be slow, but worth it) in favor of a higher-quality display.

Still, for all the talk about throwing download speed to the wind, Walker and his team do try, whenever possible, to limit the amount of bandwidth required. "Everything you put around the product detracts from its design. That's why there is no lifestyle imagery, no women on horses on the beach."

It is a tradeoff, and certainly may alienate customers with dial-up connection; but users need to see detail which wouldn't come through if the images were smaller. And while the images are larger, their color palettes are controlled. All the products are presented on a white background and are all in the same color range: platinum, gold and so on. Extraneous color is eliminated, which limits bandwidth use and speeds download.

Operating on the idea that a pretty picture-especially a big one -is all you need , sales copy is kept to a minimum. Simple headlines (often one word) are used to describe the products. This strategy makes sense also because statistics show that task-driven users skim rather than read most text on the web.

But that doesn't mean the site is all GIFS . indeed, as much as images are used to present product, the eventual goal for site is to use text as the exclusive goal for the site is to use text as the exclusive navigation strategy. In the interim, both images and HTML text are used for navigation, although visitors Ashford.com usually click on the image first. That's why Walker recommends that images always link to the most strategic place, such as a product grouping or a single product page, and that the links underneath describe where the visitors are going or what they are looking at.

Walker believes that, aesthetically, it's more honest to use html. "GIFS on a web page are primarily a legacy from the print world. On an e-commerce sit, text is almost always a link; thats the proper way to communicate information. Images are used to show the product, which you can't do with text." As the site evolves, all image map navigation is being stripped so that, eventually all navigation will be text links. Not only will this speed up download times, but will ease site maintenance on the back end of a site with constant changes for new merchandise and featured specials.

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