Quisby

TO:
Andrew Wilkinson
CEO or whatever, Metalab

Hi Andrew,

Your Photoshop skills are impressive. And your proposed redesign of Zappos shows a true mastery of rounded corners, bevels, and gradients. Unfortunately, this is 2009, and there’s more to UI design than looking pretty. I think you’ll find the helpful souls at Hacker News communicated this rather well.

As you say, your website is a huge part of customer experience. So I’ve taken the liberty of mocking up a suggested redesign of your website. I hope that you won’t find this unsolicited act of arrogance to be in bad taste.

You’ll note that I’ve simplified it to an almost excessive degree. Your current design is just too busy, and allows far too much of your content to reach the public eye. (Although it’s a little hard to tell what’s your content some of the time, since you choose to omit reblog attribution seemingly at random. But we’ve already talked about that.)

You’ll also note that I’ve reduced the colour palette drastically, and scaled back on the gradients, and drop shadows, and other visual niceties that are common in your work. Simply, I find them distracting.

These are just ideas, but I hope that you will take the time to take some of my suggestions into consideration. If necessary, you can hire me to implement this design for you — I know that this will be new ground for you, since no part of this redesign requires Photoshop.

Thanks,

nostrich

09th September 2009