Canon & Dell Sites

http://www.canon.com/
http://www.dell.com/

Unnecessary Categorization. This is something that many web sites do, for bizarre (mainly marketing) reasons. My two example sites are going to be Canon and Dell, there are many others.

So what do I mean by "Unnecessary Categorization", I mean by creating silly little categories which one is supposed to use to navigate the site. What happens when I don't fall into one of these categories? Or the product I want to buy does not fall into the category that I am supposed to fall into?

On Dell's home page your choices are Home, Small Business, Medium & Large Business, Internet Service Provider, Healthcare, Federal Government, State Government, and Education. They actually have more categories than products they sell. The major classification for their computers are: Desktop, Workstation, Notebook, Server, and Storage. (Storage really should be under Servers but I'll give it to them.)

So Dell only has five categories of products, but creates eight categories for you to choose from to navigate the site. Is a computer any different if I am in Healthcare or Government? Or if I'm in State Government or Federal Government? Not at the hardware level.

Problems with Categorization. Being a fairly sophisticated computer user, I want to buy myself a fairly sophisticated computer for home. So when I go to Dell's web site I would most likely click on Home and Home Office, since I'm buying a computer for home. But under that category they do not offer Workstations, which is what I want to buy, but only the cheaper Desktops, Workstations aren't listed anywhere in the Home section. So I must guess which category has Workstations in it.

Another problem is that depending on the category you select your choices are limited. If you select Home desktop computer you may only be able to upgrade it to 128mb of RAM, but if you select Small Office desktop computer you can get up to 512mb of RAM. And it's the same desktop computer. Try and find what category and product allows you get an ATA-100 hard drive with SDRAM.

Good luck finding the configuration you want, especially if you know what you want. I've had no problems with Dell computers, in fact I've got four of them surrounding me at work, a Workstation 410 and three Optiplexes, I also had an XPS at my previous job. They just make purchasing them difficult and it used to be so easy.

Canon
Canon does something very similar on their site. Once I get to their US site, I drool a little over the EOS 1V displayed and click Product Index. Now I get the choice of Cameras, Small Office, Corporate Office, or Industrial. I am looking for the Win2000 driver for my CanoScan FS 2710 which is a desktop film scanner. So my best guess is Small Office, which does have scanners listed. But for unknown reasons only Flatbed Scanners are listed under Small Office.

So I must browse a little more, Industrial... no... Corporate Office, nah.. Corporate Office isn't that large copiers and large network printers. Why would a little 35mm film scanner be in the Corporate Office category? but it is.

It actually pains me to bad mouth Canon at all, because I love my Canon camera so much, but their site helps me illustrate my point.

Conclusion
Don't create unnecessary categories for your products. Have a little faith that people know your products for what they are. When you create these unnecessary categories it hides your products behind another level on your site, plus what you think makes sense for categories and what goes in them does not mean your users will think the same way.

 

Related Links:

Joel On Software's Opinion about Dell's Site

Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website
Jakob Nielsen is the premier web usability guru. He has written several books on the subject and his web site contains tons of valuable information in his bi-weekly alert boxes. If you want to learn more about usablity and the web pour over his site and read everything you can.