What a bunch of geeks we are… Our collective amazement when we noticed, two weeks ago, that all the GAP online stores (GAP, Old Navy, and Banana Republic) were shut tight pending the completion of “site enhancements” would probably amuse anyone who doesn’t spend 12 hours a day thinking about and designing websites. Think of it this way: What if every GAP, Old Navy, and Banana Republic — all of them — shut their doors, at the same time, for two weeks. Okay, the financial impact was probably not as great, but these sites generated half a billion dollars in revenue last year, so a two-week absence is nothing to sneeze at from a dollars-lost perspective. So, what was the company gaining, such that they felt they could justify passing up 1/26th of their annual sales? A better user experience! A more innovative, familiar, and intuitive shopping experience that addresses a host of known customer complaints and more closely approximates a real-world shopping process. We can expect a plethora of critiques / assessments of these new features and approaches in the coming weeks — some of the new functions are quite neat, although possibly not as amazingly innovative as the company would have us believe — but our take is that this is a tremendous indication of the faith that this e-commerce leader places in the power of a positive user experience. So much so that, in addition to the millions spent on this site / system upgrade, they were willing to forego significant revenue in order to accomplish this transition.

The New York Times provides some good insights into the thinking behind this move. The piece includes a discussion of the fact that Gap Inc. chose to build their own system as opposed to buying off the shelf. The article does not point out that Gap Direct’s CEO is none other than Toby Lenk — previously known as the CEO of eToys. You can read that story for yourself.

Take a look at the new sites and let us know what you think.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 1:53 pm and is filed under E-commerce, User Interface Design.