Usability and expectations, looking at Gap

I walk past a Gap store everyday on my way to and from work. Usually I don’t have time to go in, because I have to get home for the kids, but I do see the advertising board they put out on the pavement promoting their “Best fit” jeans. Having lived in New York some years ago, at a time Gap already had a US transactional website – which I used – I thought it would be interesting to see how the newly launched UK (sorry, European!) version stacked up.

First things first: I tried gap.co.uk and got nowhere – actually, I got to an IT services company. Oops. Somebody didn’t do their IP protection homework. So I resorted to googling and, well, it is a .eu site. Which I suppose makes sense for a European site, except a lot of people just don’t think of using a .eu TLD at first attempt. If I had gone to Gap.com, though, it wouldn’t have given me an easy way to the European store: worse in fact, it advertises that it now ships internationally!

Back to the UK: immediately I was struck by the consistency in branding: the colours, the wording, the best fit campaign right there on the home page. The home page is a little bit busy but this is be due to the launch box on the right which one assumes will disappear (or be replaced by something else) in the future. Actually, this box clearly advertises free standard delivery on orders over £50 and that returns are free. Clicking on the “learn more” in the launch box, I like the way they present the delivery and shopping options as it is easy to see basic info at a glance.

Back on the home page, clicking on the 1969 premium jeans/women, I immediately get to the page: the site loads very fast, which is great. There, I have a choice of styles on the left hand side; on the main area, I have a horizontal, automatic scrolling displays that as I get to the page scrolls right and left – indicating to the first time user it is a scrolling tool. This is smart, as otherwise a user might not notice; after this settles, in fact, to see more images I have to place my cursor on the right (or left) of the image for it to scroll. This also reveals a “more fits” box somewhat needlessly, since by going to that spot I start off the scrolling anyway.

If I actually look below this display there are 2 photos of jeans in a randomly selected style. What I didn’t see first time round is that all the styles are displayed if you scroll down below fold, because by default the selection is to “show all (you can choose to only see 24 per page).

If you click on a style on the left hand side list or on the photo in the main area, you get a clear landing page, with title telling you what style you are in and the selection highlighted in orange on the left menu. There is however an inconsistency in that some styles get a wide blue banner title whereas others get a vertical black text one – can’t seem to think why.

The photos are nice in that they are of a woman wearing the jeans rather than just the garment flat on some white surface (which makes it harder to evaluate the fit); however, as seems to be the norm with such photos, they are certainly not average size (Maybe a UK 4? I’m guessing here) so it is quite hard to imagine how they would fit on you (unless you are a size 4!).

Some retailers will actually state what size the model in the photo is wearing within the product description (eg from my-wardropbe.com for a pair of jeans: “Model is a standard waist 26 and is wearing a 26”) and also provide garment measurement, so that if you are not sure about size you can check, which is very helpful. Given that Gap sizes, in my experience, can be a little hit and miss, this might be a good idea – if well executed, of course.

For these jeans, though, I know which style/size I want because I already own a pair and am just getting a different wash, so this should be pretty straight forward. And it is – but as it turns out they’re out of stock. I guess I’ll have to try my luck at the store…