online catalogues 1

[loox]

Hi all,

can you guys pass along any examples of great and good looking catalogues that you've seen on the web.

I'm making a parts catalogue for my brother and I want to find a good user experience.

and I am going to set a forum, so I need some mates to join too

 

[imstillatwork]

try

http://www.northwestcandlesupply.com

go to products. I made that for my wife..

 

[csteinhilber]

If you happen to have the opportunity to attend a presentation by Jeffrey Veen of adaptivepath.com, I definitely recommend it. He gives a lot of really useful information about enabling the user experience, and how people tend to think while they're trying to access information.

At any rate, he gave one in our area not too long ago called Beyond Usability, in which he showed off a number of catalogs. Two of which still stand out in my mind as excellent.

First-

http://fisherbikes.com/matchmaker/

along with the "compare bikes" page at the same site

http://fisherbikes.com/compare/

(try selecting only two bikes to compare and see what it randomly puts up as the third... it's pretty funny)

And second-
while it's not a true, live catalog... I love the concept of this demo:

http://www.iokio.biz/demos/camerafinder/

Both of the examples empower the user by giving them the ability to dynamically filter the catalog based on one or several attributes that they feel are important (rather than the attributes you as the retailer feel are important).

In an age where far too many online catalogs are categorized, say, alphabetically by name, when the typical user may not know or even care about the nonsense name someone in some ivory tower of corporate marketing gave to a widget, or categorized by color of a widget when 9 out of 10 customers really only care about the size, these two examples are a breath of fresh air, IMHO.


-Carl