Not My Cup of Tea
I'm a designer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I can't turn it off. Even when I'm not at work, I can't help adjusting the kerning of signs in my head or mentally retouching a badly photoshopped image. I'm always looking for sins against typography and websites that don’t function as well as they could.
The other day I visited davidstea.com to check out their new winter teas. The site itself is fun, modern, and easy to navigate, but buying tea is harder than it should be. I found a few problems with their shopping process that are really simple to fix and it’s been driving me crazy ever since.
David’s Tea offers a 10% discount on the purchase of 10 oz. or more of a single tea. But they don’t tell anyone about it. A simple note on the product page informing users about the volume discount would probably encourage people to buy more. Don’t keep it a secret, David.
Say I added 8 oz. of tea to my shopping cart and wanted to increase my order to qualify for this discount… I can’t. The shopping cart’s ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ buttons only allow me to order multiples of the quantity I’ve already, unknowingly, locked in. Increasing my quantity to two means ordering 16 oz. of tea, and because they’re viewed as two individual orders, neither qualifies for the 10% discount. There’s no way to modify my order from 8 oz. to 10 oz. without removing the item, then revisiting the individual product page, and finally adding a new item to my cart.
There’s a lot of reasons a user would adjust their order from the shopping cart. They might want to spend more to qualify for free shipping, correct an error, or pare down an order that’s out of their budget. Unfortunately David’s Tea makes any adjustment a hassle. This can be fixed with a pretty simple tweak to this page:
I would have the controls at checkout mimic those on the product page so users can increase or decrease their quantity in two ounce increments using 'plus' and 'minus' buttons. All adjustments can happen right at checkout. Plus a few visual tweaks also means the page can become a bit shorter, bringing the free shipping promotion, promo code, and subtotal into view on the same screen. These small adjustments would have a big impact on the user experience.