I’ve noticed some interesting zoom interfaces on product-driven eCommerce sites recently — the web 2.0 of zoom, if you will. Three in particular stand out as being progressive: Nike, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Endless (Amazon’s new handbag/shoe shop).

Endless and Dick’s both use a dual panel design where the user controls the location of zoom (on the item) with a small box on one panel and views the zoomed in part of the product on an adjacent panel. Both cover part of the page with the “zoomed” panel, and Dick’s zoom panel actually slides out from “underneath” the product image (though you won’t be able to see that from my static image below).

(endless left, dick’s right)

In both of these examples, some page content is covered by the zoom portion of the image — not a big problem but not ideal either. On Dick’s site, the animation of the zoom panel sliding out takes a few seconds, again not a major issue (and it does look quite “slick”), but still a waste of a few seconds. (On endless the zoom panel simply appears.)

Although the image quality is stunning in these zoom functions, it seems more difficult to me when a user has to control the image in one panel and look at it in another. The traditional zoom model allows users to simply click and zoom or scroll exactly on the image where they want to view.

Nike seems to have come up with an even better solution, allowing the user to click and zoom where they mean to view, not covering up content, and serving up a large, high-quality image.

This isn’t perfect either — in my review of Nike’s site I wrote: “The zoom feature can be a bit strange at first, as the product description and selection fields appear over top of the enlarged product. I think that this will become less befuddling after repeated use, but I was thrown the first time I saw it.” That said, I still think that Nike has come up with the best solution because it shows a stunningly high-quality image without forcing users to learn new behaviors or focus on more than one point on the page at the same time. Nike also offers multiple levels of zoom, allowing the user to view a broader or more focused image, another nice option.

After attending the Barry Schwartz presentation about “The Paradox of Choice” at Shop.org’s Annual Summit back in September, I was excited to read his book of the same name. Schwartz points out that despite the fact that people with more choices may, in the long run, end up with a better overall outcome, they will be less satisfied with that outcome. This is because an endless supply of choices leads to stress, added effort to find the best choice, and regret after the choice is made. These ideas really struck a chord with me, as I myself am a “maximizer”, someone who insists on finding the very best solution even when others that are more easily available would serve me almost as well with far less effort, so I quickly found the book at a local library.

Although the Shop.org presentation was geared towards retailers aiming to offer a better experience to their customers via less stressful choice, I read the book for my own personal gain. If I could learn to “satisfice” instead of “maximize”, according to Schwartz, I’d be a happier guy. Unfortunately, the book spend most of its 288 pages trying to convince me that choice is a problem — a fact of which I was convinced during his speech — and offered little advice for how to avoid the pitfalls of choice and become happier. As GI Joe told me, knowing is half the battle, so I suppose that the book’s seemingly endless examples of choice paradoxes will only serve to help me recognize maximizing situations in the future, but I still could not help wishing there was more of a solution in sight.

One thing I do like about The Paradox of Choice is that it doesn’t have a catchy name that includes barking cats or purple cows. It presents actual ideas with real examples. Its a quick read, so check it out.