I was very impressed when I first read Fang Jun’s blog on Geoffrey A. Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.  With the point that for most new technology, new product and new companies, there is a chasm between the early adopters of the product (the technology enthusiasts and visionaries) and the early majority (the pragmatists), Moore has presented this famous diagram of ‘the big scary chasm’ in this book.

When I first joint haibao.cn, I thought it was a site just standing by the edge of this chasm. We have almost 500k users and over 3 million page views everyday. Pretty good for a team of 15 and a company for only 2 years. However, I am still very eager to know how to help this company to jump over the big scary chasm and reach the market of early majority.

I thought about many ways, say cooperation with other media and do marketing stuff. But after four month, my experience in this special start up company gives me some other views. I used to believe that what determined whether a company or product can survive the journey from the early adopters to the early majority is in the the product itself or the marketing investment. Now, what I realize more is that, some start up company might be restricted by themselves. Just like a new born baby, besides all the threatens a baby should face to, he or she must face some trouble within the body as well.

The threatens within the company might comes from the founders themselves, the employees and disharmonious comes all the way when the company fast gaining market.

Well, it might take so much to talk about this issue and I guess I would try my best to put them here as a mark for my brand new journey in this growing company.

Dear Notepad, I have been away for a while and sort of tired about shifting into a new job. Not until this week I find some time to relax from being a new kid in the neighbourhood.

Well, now I work for www.haibao.cn, a very cool Chinese fashion website which only does fashion, celebrities and gossips. Now I am in charge of the e-business team, to build it as a e-flagship shop for quality online fashion shopping. It sounds like being an advertising here, however, it takes one months to figure out how difficult and challenging is that.

I used to divide how a person grow up in a career into four parts, as 无知无畏，有知有畏，有知无畏，无知无畏。I guess by moving into this job, I am gradually moving from the second stage onto the third stage. For example, I have no idea about cosmetics product, (well although I have been using these stuff but I am still not professional in this field),  but I pick up the knowledge of product position, ingredients, naming, pricing, marketing strategy and so on in this 6 weeks. Still, I am not an expert, but I am on my way. Also, I started to learn the e-commerce environment in China and how to run a e-flagship shop with only 4 or 5 people as a team.

The battle’s just started and a warrior has no way to escape. All I want to do is to play this game, have fun and be helpful to people around me and my company

I am playing around with some major portal sites in China for the fashion and beauty channels watching how they do the product guidance. Here is something I found on women.sohu.com, women.sina.com and yoka.com (a vertical site here just for comparison).

Ok, let’s start with the product guidance on the home page of beauty channels.

We can see there are two different strategy.

Sina Women divided the content into two big categories first: function and brand nationality. Then, in every category, we see the clear major sub-class, which is skin care, make up, body care, hair care and perfume for the first line of ‘Function’ while the second line for ‘brand nationaly’ includes sub-class of Europe and US, Japan and Korea, and China.

Sohu Women uses a vertical tab box to divide the content into there categories, which is Brands, Function and Product type. It seems very similar as the Sina one, however, in each tab page, there are dozens of links which takes some time to find out ‘ L’oreal Pairs‘ in Brand, or ‘Eye Shadow’ in Product Type. On the other hand, I doubt why they use tab box for the major guidance because tabs pages dose not make much sense for most of Chinese netizen.

I also find this guidance on Yoka.com. It does not serve as the navigation guidance on the top of the page but it also provides a very good way of dividing and classifying the content.

Next important guidance, or index may be more appropriate, is the page gateway for brands. In fashion and beauty industry, ‘brand’ is everything and consumers tends to search for what they want by ‘brand’. Therefore, most of the sites put great efforts in building a ‘complete brand collection’ to help their users.

Let’s take a look at this index design from Sohu and Yoka.

Both of these sites use alphabet for the index. The difference is Sohu provides brand logo so that some of the female users can find the brand easily (yes, women are graphic oriented). Sohu provides a left column for hot brands, functions and Q&A. However, Yoka’s product design has its advantages as well. For example it is more informative in one page and it’s takes less clicks to find a brand.

So what is my favourite  way of categorization?  Here I would show a guidance from a Taobao Shop.

click to see the whole picture

Well, my point is there is no right or wrong in guidance and index designs. The key is to suit the users behavior and provide good experience in helping the user finding out what they want. It puts the function, the brand nationality, the hot recommendations and best selling stuff altogether in a tiny space. This Taobao shop has been running for years and it is very successful in business. The shop owner is not a user experience expert or product design professional. However, she or he manages to make this index into a very informative and helpful index. I stop again and again here to check out what to buy.

Good product design ease the difficulty for users to operate and great design brings business!

The focus pictures are very important to a portal site, as important as the cover of a magazine, or a poster for a movie.

To make an attractive focus picture is the essential work for fashion website editors. It shows the top content and the position of the site and shows the taste and style of site as well. Therefore, we can absolutely judge the site by its ‘focus’

In this article of Showcase of Beautiful Fashion Websites Steven Snell summarized some of the trends in Fashion websites.

Large Photos

Naturally, and industry that is very dependent on image will make heavy use of photos and models. Many of the sites use large background images, some will use a slideshow type of approach to feature multiple photos. Going a step further from photos, some of the sites use large video areas on the homepage.

Black and White

Black, white and gray color schemes are very popular among the sites showcased here. Simple color schemes are capable of creating an elegant look, plus with so many colorful photos it helps to keep focus on the products rather than on other design elements.

Minimal Content on Homepage

There are a few different types of sites showcased here. Most are sites that belong to a particular designer or fashion brand, while other are fashion news sites. Those that are news sites will obviously include a larger amount of content, which means a homepage that can be very involved. However, looking at the sites that represent a designer or a brand, you will see that the majority have very little content on the homepage. In some cases the homepage is nothing more than a large photo and a navigation menu.

However, I would say those key elements are very basic ones for fashion sites because of the following reasons:

1. Fashion is absolutely a visual business. From the designers, brand companies, productions, to the shows, models, boutiques and consumers, they are all visual oriented. So can you imagine they play a part in this industry chain without clear visual images?
2. Most of the smart and outstanding fashion sites are designed in black and white because the fashion items and the models are so COLOURFUL. I happy the site designers finally understand this basic rule that the best platform to let your colourful stuff to standout, is to make the others black and white.
3. Why minimal content is new and trendy to fashion sites? It’s always a rule in fashion magazines, right? Since the users of fashion site is largely the some group of people who are fashion magazine readers, site designers should be careful with the strong user habit formed long ago by magazine reading.

Anyway, I would say Mr. Steven Snell has done a good job in collecting fashion site design style and summarizing them.

Please also see the show case of some fabulous fashion sites and you would love them as I do, but just don’t shop that much as the ecomics’ so bad now.