Update: Nikon eventually restored the All capability and table-view as the default. So a temporary disruption. One of the joys of updating Web sites is that sometimes the wrong behaviors get resurfaced.
I was doing some research for my next book and went to the NikonUSA Web site to look up a lens. As I often do I clicked on All lenses. What I got was a table of 15 lenses. Wait, what?
It turns out that NikonUSA has redesigned this section of their site, now allowing a tiled view, list view, and table view. List view (which is really a list-plus-more view) and Tiled view say they'll show you all lenses, but don’t. The old default Table view currently only shows 15 items at a time, and the Next Page indicator is not visible on my Retina display without scrolling. Actually, it’s below the footnotes, which aren’t short, and it simply is a 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, which I guess the designers hope the site visitor will interpret as page number. And by the way, a default of “sort by lens mount” produces lens lists in a seemingly random order. Oopsie.
None of the camera makers seem to know how to help site visitors see the current promoted items (the marketing messages) while still easily navigating to something specific. It’s not an easy problem to solve. NikonUSA hasn’t solved it, and this iteration is worse than before.
As many of you know, I’m in the middle of site redesigning myself, so I’m keenly sensitive to the problems site developers run into. In particular, Google’s insistence that all sites have to be fully display responsive leads to all kinds of issues and now has us all locked in doomscrolling to find things. The more things you need to have present on your site, the bigger the problems become as you try to deal with both mobile and desktop. And then there’s light (daytime) and dark (nighttime) modes to be dealt with, too.
Complex, complicated, deep, broad, and detailed information is really tough to do right in a way that the site visitor immediately has an idea what to do, where they can go, and how they can get there.