I like watching others use web pages to do constructive tasks to see what they consider an out of box experience to be. It is also interesting to see where the webdesign forces them to struggle. I was curiously watching my partner navigate her way through the J Crew website recently. It is a standard shopping interface limited by the normalisation choices of the database designers. Brian Goetz wrote on introducing an article on java threading:
Languages, libraries, and frameworks shape the way we write programs. Even though Alonzo Church showed in 1934 that all the known computational frameworks were equivalent in the set of programs they could represent, the set of programs that real programmers actually write is shaped by the idioms that the programming model driven by languages, libraries, and frameworks makes easy to express.My partner found the J Crew website frustrating as the database normalisation choices were not the same as what she wanted to sort on and left her with too many results. The interesting part here is that the database, which is normally the first thing designed and then set in stone, limited how the store front could work.
