The Tendo View

Apple’s website does a great job of maintaining the company’s consistent and powerful branding and provides a lot of engaging content. But like much of Apple’s user interface design, what seems simple on the surface can get complicated fast if you need something specific.

BRAVO

The website follows the same sense of visual simplicity as the company’s products. The home page ensures that the featured product takes center stage with lots of white space, limited copy, and large images. Apple displays restraint by focusing most of the home page’s attention on one product at a time, usually its latest release.

The site places a heavy emphasis on visual design, blending colorful imagery with bold headlines and copy to create balanced compositions on each page. It’s a pleasant departure from the usual column format with pictures in boxes.

The copy is short, decisive, and punchy (if a tad smug at times) and does a good job of tapping that emotional response to Apple’s products that makes its fan base so loyal. And just like all of Apple’s branding, it’s carried out consistently across the site, from the copy to the look and feel.

Because Apple has fewer products to sell (as compared to Dell or HP, which sell hundreds of products to a variety of market segments), the site is easily divided into six segments: the store, three product categories (Mac, iPod/iTunes, and iPhone), downloads, and support.

TRY AGAIN

While the site offers seemingly rich and varied product info, including video and galleries of dramatic product photography, most of it offers more style than substance. Many links on the site, such as the “iPod Your Life” link, lead to pages that are little more than additional branding experiences, yet provide no additional value.

Top-level navigation, such as locating your desired product or service segment, is easy. But cross navigation, i.e. moving from one segment to another without using the top navigation, is unclear, if it exists at all. Beware the hapless user looking for clear links to iPod support in the iPod product segment.

Apple offers a ton of self-help product support on its site, but finding the specific info you need can be extremely difficult. Basic problems are easy enough to locate and solve with the support content, but it ends there. Need to find information on problems that are more complicated? The answers are usually buried deep within the discussion forums.

We have to throw some props to Apple for supporting and maintaining such a robust online community of users, but navigating the vast discussion boards is like entering a labyrinth. Cross–navigation to other discussion boards isn’t possible, and if you do find some useful information, you’d better copy and paste it into another document because you may never find it again. While the moderators do a decent job of responding to posts (and providing links to other posts or other areas of the site that may answer questions), the discussion boards mainly work because of the persistence and helpful nature of other Apple users who have encountered—then solved—a multitude of problems.

Overall, Apple’s site is a branding powerhouse that is presented beautifully and consistently. It stands apart from other consumer electronics e-commerce sites. But also true to Apple’s tendency, a little more polishing beneath the surface would make for a user experience that matches its sleek design.