I always see McMaster-Carr praised on HN, but almost never does it seem to be acknowledged as website that can only exist for engineers.
Generalizing anything from it onto the general internet population seems like thinking about education starting from a great calculus course: some useful lessons can be learned, but you do need to acknowledge that the average problem is very different.
And in the end we're left with: make a fast website, clean UI, intuitive flows.
I disagree. Yes, the specific website is for engineers and manufacturing businesses, but everything discussed here and in the article applies just as much to any e-commerce store. The core idea is: the store doesn't waste your time.
> And in the end we're left with: make a fast website, clean UI, intuitive flows.
That is what almost all e-commerce platforms fail at, on top of abusive, adversarial design.
The difference is that on many consumers stores you have a much higher percent of impulse shopping, that actually increases revenue with some amount of time wasting. PMs can use that as justification to add all sorts of frustrating patterns that actually lose money in the long-run.
Not addressing this as well seems to me to only give half the picture, that was what I was trying to say.
Generalizing anything from it onto the general internet population seems like thinking about education starting from a great calculus course: some useful lessons can be learned, but you do need to acknowledge that the average problem is very different.
And in the end we're left with: make a fast website, clean UI, intuitive flows.