Editing Boo.com (section)

=== Problems with users experience ===

[[File:Boo Homepage.jpg|thumb|right|The Boo.com Homepage as it appeared in May 2000.]]

The boo.com website was widely criticized as poorly designed for its target audience, going against many [[usability]] conventions.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.bohmann.dk/articles/usability_reviews/boo_com.html |title=Site Comment: Boo.com (Bohmann Usability) |access-date=7 October 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110605213429/http://www.bohmann.dk/articles/usability_reviews/boo_com.html |archive-date=5 June 2011 |url-status=dead }}</ref> The site relied heavily on [[JavaScript]] and [[Adobe Flash|Flash]] technology to display [[pseudo-3D]] views of wares as well as Miss Boo, a sales-assistant-style [[avatar (computing)|avatar]]. The first publicly released version of the site included many large pages; the home page, for example, was several hundred kilobytes which meant that many users had to wait minutes for the site to load, as [[broadband]] technologies were not widely available at the time. The site's front page contained the warning, "this site is designed for 56K modems and above".

The complicated design required the site to be displayed in a fixed-size window, which limited the space available to display product information to the customer. Navigation techniques changed as the customer moved around the site.

The site's interface was complex and included a hierarchical system that required the user to answer four or five different questions before sometimes revealing that there were no products in stock in a particular sub-section. The same basic questions then had to be answered again until results were found.