Web 2.0 in action?

(I continued to browse the site – “with reduced functionality”)

I tend to come across pages like this only when I’ve disabled JS for developing purposes. What I find interesting about this page is that while the user is told that they can continue, the wording and the requirements box to the right make it sound so important that Javascript is enabled.

Particularly, to say that the site will not “work properly” implies a failure on their part to make it work according to the basics. A catalogue, a search and a shop shouldn’t require this, though they may be enhanced by it.

I had a wrangle over just this issue in a telephone call a week or so ago, resulting in the vendor of the hosted shopping cart system (names omitted to protect the redeemed) changing their JS based menu system to plain old HTML. The changes simply meant their links worked without JS, with absolutely no change to the user interface or mode of use. An easy, but for some elusive, solution. Jakob Nielsen has noted the very same trend.

It’s probably fair to say that the majority of users have JS disabled inadvertantly and this is their way of guiding them back to full capacity, but error pages – which this is – stop a visitor in their tracks, highlight failure, and apportion guilt – the customer is of course, wrong.

Better surely to give them the same functionality of searching, viewing and buying just the same without script. Those users that aren’t scared away by the error page may instead be insulted by it. If there are scripted features you want a user to see, give them a nudge, not a banana skin.

I noticed no difference using their site without scripting than from the last time I visited with, and in the end it was their poor product search that really made the experience worthless.