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Show HN: A site using zero images – any feedback on the UI?

40 pointsby rosspandaalmost 12 years ago

36 comments

nickloewenalmost 12 years ago
I agree with basically everything that has been said so far. Now, I don&#x27;t drive or buy tires, but I do dabble in design, so here are the first things I see when I start nit-picking:<p>* The nav text is too small to read comfortably.<p>* For the nav in the top right: why is it in that spot? It doesn&#x27;t line up with other content, so it looks out of place.<p>* TyreSum.beta – my first thought was: &#x27;there is a .beta TLD?&#x27; This is confusing.<p>* The logotype doesn&#x27;t need an underline when you mouse over it.<p>* &#x27;We compare so you don&#x27;t have to&#x27; – you have used periods throughout your whole site... but not to end your slogan?<p>* Why are the buttons shiny? Then, why aren&#x27;t they shiny when you click on them? Why is the gradient on the properties-of-tyres buttons is different from the submit button&#x27;s gradient?<p>* Why do the buttons have squared corners when the container and the submit button have rounded ones? (Or, why do the other things have rounded corners?)<p>* Why are the buttons all square, when the text takes up less than half of their height? Since they are, why is the text (very tight!) at the top?<p>* &#x27;Width&#x27;, &#x27;Profile&#x27;, and &#x27;Size&#x27; look awkwardly narrow centred on the wide rows of buttons. You could make them look chunkier, or move them to the left of the rows, or something. It would also be nice to see more padding between them and the rows above. The padding on the page is not very consistent all-around.<p>* For example… the padding on the container is awkward. There is a bunch of whitespace on the left and right, and an awkward mismatch of whitespace size on top and bottom.<p>* The container has a shadow but nothing else does; except for the gradients on the buttons, if you see that as a shadow – in which case this is doubly awkward because the shadows are running in different directions.<p>* Why is the container 940px wide? Since the contents don&#x27;t seem to fill it horizontally, it could be narrower. This would be good because it would work better on smaller screens – especially mobile devices.<p>* On the search page:<p>* It&#x27;s a little strange that &#x27;make and cheapest model&#x27; contains links, and &#x27;website&#x27; doesn&#x27;t. I couldn&#x27;t guess where those links were going to take me.<p>* You have a &#x27;price&#x27; column, and then a &#x27;purchase&#x27; column, where each button has the price on it. The &#x27;price&#x27; column could go. (You have to be able to sort based on the purchase column, then, though.)<p>* Why are the contents of some columns centred while others are left aligned?<p>* Why are the website names a different size and font weight, and why are they all in caps?<p>* As others mentioned, you don&#x27;t need the back buttons.<p>* &#x27;Showing…&#x27; doesn&#x27;t line up with anything.<p>* I don&#x27;t have a suggestion here per se, but it takes several clicks to get from stating a size to buying a tyre. To me, the information hierarchy was not obvious. After I got past the search page, I was confused each time I saw another link. I couldn&#x27;t predict where any of those would take me. Eventually I figured it out, but it would be good if I didn&#x27;t have to.<p>* Write good, semantic HTML, and validate it. You are using a bunch of deprecated elements (like &lt;center&gt;) where you should be using CSS instead, for example. <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tyresum.co.uk%2F&amp;charset=%28detect+automatically%29&amp;doctype=Inline&amp;group=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;validator.w3.org&#x2F;check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tyresum.c...</a><p>Hope that helps. Basically, I think their are two main points. The first is about implementation: you should try to follow coding best practices, like using semantic HTML and sanitizing your SQL. The second, which relates to design, is that every aspect of your design should have a &#x27;why.&#x27; If someone asks (or, hopefully, you ask yourself) &#x27;why is this here? why is this this colour? why is this this size?&#x27; etc. you should have a rock-solid answer. If the user finds themselves wondering those things, it probably means it needs work; likewise if you don&#x27;t have an answer.
oinksoftalmost 12 years ago
It would be pretty neat if you could figure out ahead of time which combinations were possible, disabling buttons for impossible combinations and reserving the &quot;Size not found, please try again&quot; message for weird exceptions where your index is out of date.
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incisionalmost 12 years ago
1.) UI is confusing. Not immediately clear what&#x27;s a button.<p>2.) Not UI feedback, but the data seems pretty sparse. Getting not found on relatively common sizes.<p>3.) I&#x27;d wager the average person has no idea about width, profile and size. You really need a way to search by make&#x2F;model&#x2F;year for something like this or at least a quick guide on how to read the sidewall to get the information.<p>4.) I&#x27;d be more interested in the type of tire (all-season, snow, sport) than the make or source website at the second step.<p>5.) Tires are probably not the best thing to sell via a minimally visual site. There&#x27;s a reason sites like tirerack have gone to the trouble to provide tools to simulate what tire&#x2F;wheel combos will look like on a specific make&#x2F;model&#x2F;year&#x2F;color of car.<p>People care about what their vehicles look like, right down to the tires.
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andrewljohnsonalmost 12 years ago
Instead of letting me search for things that don&#x27;t exist, use JavaScript to update the UI when I select from the top rows.
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scootalmost 12 years ago
Nice clean UI, but:<p>You don&#x27;t offer filtering by (or at least display in the table of) the speed and load rating - these are critical to legal tyres, and could invalidate insurance if found to be incorrect.<p>You don&#x27;t filter &#x2F; display EU tyre labelling - not sure what your legal obligation is, but it would be useful to be able to set a minimum economy &#x2F; grip or maximum noise rating, or sort results by those.<p>You only display brand, not model - most premium brands have several models in each size, for example Continental EcoContact, PremiumContact, SportContact - I may only be interested in one of those.<p>Otherwise, good job!
tsmalmost 12 years ago
I got excited--it <i>looks</i> great in ELinks! But doesn&#x27;t actually work (none of the buttons are clickable). <a href="http://i.imgur.com/zH5E2Ib.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;zH5E2Ib.png</a>
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tezzaalmost 12 years ago
1. As mentioned, you need a pointer hover for the buttons. Otherwise I had to guess they were buttons.<p>.<p>2. &#x27;Size not found, please try again&#x27;<p>This not found message is small and displays in the wrong place. When you click the calculate&#x2F;search button, your gaze is down at the bottom, and the error appears at the top of the page, out of sight.<p>Perhaps animate the color of the button, during search going purple say, then when the result is in ( none: red, some: green )<p>.<p>3. Please number the search parameters. You need all 3 to have values. Make them bigger too, they get lost.<p>.<p>4. &#x27;We compare so you don&#x27;t have to&#x27;... I&#x27;d put that as &#x27;Save time comparing tyre prices with our simple wizard&#x27;<p>.<p>5. Include a working example with some actual results as a link. Chose a common car. Ford Fiesta 2009 165 x 30 x 13 ==&gt; 40 comparisons
user24almost 12 years ago
I know nothing about tires (and had forgotten that we spell it tyre here in the UK), but I do know that a lot of people mix imperial and decimal measurements. Do you account for that, is it not an issue with tires, or should you add in a either a unit of measurement or the ability to enter measurements in multiple units?
phirealalmost 12 years ago
&quot;We compare so you don&#x27;t have too&quot; should be &quot;We compare so you don&#x27;t have to&quot;
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codergirlalmost 12 years ago
Would be nice if you could select your vehicle and it&#x27;d auto select a likely size
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bereft_orangealmost 12 years ago
2 things:<p>1. Care to post a default so it&#x27;s possible to explore? Couldn&#x27;t figure out a working combination. 2. When you hit an error, would be helpful if you kept the previous selection prefilled (either via AJAX request or passing along the previous selection in the URL).
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sdfjklalmost 12 years ago
Find out whatever the most common tire size is and preselect it. This serves both to explain how it works (i.e. you have to make 3 selections) and lets people see what the site does with just one click (instead of 4).
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noir_lordalmost 12 years ago
If I select Width then Profile at that point you can calculate (ajax callback for example) which sizes are available for that combination and grey out the ones I <i>cant</i> pick.<p>At that point you could get rid of Find Best Price for Tyres completely (as the system would know there are results at that point and display them for me) (or keep it just in case).<p>EDIT: You could also grey out the Find Best Price for Tyres until at least one selection is made since people may want to look for 205mm in 1 or more sizes.
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jabikoalmost 12 years ago
#) It seems like you&#x27;re not sanitizing the input parameters before using them to construct a SQL query. You should propably fix this.<p>#) You shouldn&#x27;t output the SQL error messages to the user.<p>#) The purchase column shouldn&#x27;t have a sort icon if it isn&#x27;t sortable.<p>#) IMHO the back button doesn&#x27;t add any value since it just duplicates browser functionality.<p>Another little nitpick‎: The sort icon on the page is a image ;-)
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jeremytalmost 12 years ago
Two things that I saw:<p>* If there are instructions, that&#x27;s usually a red flag to me that I&#x27;ve done something poorly in the UI design. I agree with one of the previous commenters that you should do a make&#x2F;model search instead.<p>* I&#x27;m not quite sure what to do with the filter field on the results page. It&#x27;s just a blank text field. Does it filter by keyword?
infogulchalmost 12 years ago
If you click a button and drag the mouse it starts a rectangular selection that can select multiple buttons on the same row. (Chrome, Win 7)
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mark-ruwtalmost 12 years ago
I&#x27;d guess that very few people know the size of their tires offhand, so their first experience will be experimentation.<p>Add a list of the &quot;Most Popular&quot; 5 tires sizes so that these first-time users can still use the site and understand what it does. Then when they actually need to shop, hopefully they&#x27;ll give you another go.
clintonhalpinalmost 12 years ago
In terms of UI things are looking good, I&#x27;d love to see some more custom style&#x27;s as opposed to just bootstrap styles. I think the biggest complaint is the lack of padding. If you would add a bit more it might make things feel a bit better. ie. &quot;width&quot; &quot;profile&quot; and &quot;size&quot; headers on front page.
minimaxiralmost 12 years ago
I&#x27;d recommend against using the Default Bootstrap CSS (tm) if you&#x27;re trying for a unique UI approach.
lewispollardalmost 12 years ago
Not really UI feedback but &quot;clicking on the box&#x27;s below&quot; box&#x27;s should be boxes
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smoyeralmost 12 years ago
How about putting the number of available listings in parenthesis below each button number (width, profile and size). Instead of just enabling&#x2F;disabling the buttons when a selection is made, update the count of available items.
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nrabinsalmost 12 years ago
It looks like you can multi-select (through ctrl-clicking or click-dragging), but it doesn&#x27;t appear that that has any influence over the results. It seems to only choose one item from each row to search over.
aualinalmost 12 years ago
Add cursor: pointer or similar to the boxes where you select size, etc.
brudgersalmost 12 years ago
Browsed with Windows Phone 7.8<p>I found it intuitive and easy to use. The interface reflects the the data domain it represents rather than glomming the data onto a generic shopping solution.
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xr09almost 12 years ago
Maybe I&#x27;m a freak but putting a js in a css folder feels weird.<p>&lt;script src=&quot;&#x2F;css&#x2F;tyrejs.js&quot; type=&quot;text&#x2F;javascript&quot;&gt;&lt;&#x2F;script&gt;
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assaflaviealmost 12 years ago
What this then? <a href="http://www.tyresum.co.uk/images/graph.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tyresum.co.uk&#x2F;images&#x2F;graph.png</a> :)
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imdsmalmost 12 years ago
Found an image: <a href="http://www.tyresum.co.uk/corporate.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tyresum.co.uk&#x2F;corporate.php</a>
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ss64almost 12 years ago
It would be nice if the buttons actually looked like tyres, you could also make them wider&#x2F;thinner to reflect the different sizes.
grrrandoalmost 12 years ago
Aesthetics are a big part of UI, and the default Booststrap aesthetic works only with some supplemented creativity.
maximilianburkealmost 12 years ago
As an autocrosser it would be great to have some bigger tire sizes (275, 285, 295, 305, 315, 335) to choose from.
rosspandaalmost 12 years ago
ps. data is almost clean just a few bits to sort out. so please ignore any duped data etc.
tlongrenalmost 12 years ago
Good job. Haven&#x27;t we been doing this for a few years with CSS3? I have anyway.
rosspandaalmost 12 years ago
p.s. 205&#x2F;45 17 is a good test tyre size
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techplexalmost 12 years ago
tyre Whats that?
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WayneDBalmost 12 years ago
Off Topic: The word is &quot;grateful&quot; (although greatful is a common misspelling). I was just thinking about this because I&#x27;ve been listening to a lot of Grateful Dead and I was wondering which was the correct spelling. Turns out they spelled it right.
dokemalmost 12 years ago
Wait. You own tiersum.com and still decided to call tires &#x27;tyres&#x27;? Why don&#x27;t you, ya know, spell the word correctly?<p>When I visited your page, between the horrid spelling and lack of images, I had no clue what the hell your site was supposed to do.
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