{"id":101,"date":"2005-06-30T10:47:56","date_gmt":"2005-06-30T18:47:56","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2016-05-25T23:34:36","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T06:34:36","slug":"nike-custom-shoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/archive\/2005\/06\/nike-custom-shoes","title":{"rendered":"Nike.com: Still Confusing After All These Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I’ve been a critic of Nike’s online presence since the first time I tried to find out about a shoe seven years ago and was greeted instead with a confusing Flash movie having nothing to do with shoes and leading me around in circles until I had to go to Google. “Design vomit” is what I call that stuff, and most things Nike did back then reeked of it.<\/p>\n

Over the last few years, the company seems to have gotten more web-savvy and now produces a good mix of design-driven and utilitarian interfaces depending on what the marketing goals are for any particular sub-site.<\/p>\n

Wanting to give them another shot, and needing a pair of running shoes now that I actually have time to run<\/a>, I checked out nike.com and found this really cool shoe<\/a> that you can custom design for yourself online.<\/p>\n

Great!<\/p>\n

I spent the next 10 minutes choosing the colors of every single element of the shoe, right down to the lace eyelets, through a very slickly done Flash interface. I went to the University of Washington for my undergrad degree so the shoe I created was black, purple, and gold. The process couldn’t have been any easier… kudos to the Flash team on configurator:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Then came the breakdown.<\/p>\n

There was no “add to cart” button anywhere. There was a “store locator” button so I assumed they wanted me to go down to Niketown or something and try it on first and then maybe order it from the store. Luckily, I have a Niketown about a 15 minute bike ride from my place so I pedaled down there and tried on a non-configured version of the shoe. Size 11, great. I asked the guy how to go about ordering the customized version and he told me to go online.<\/p>\n

I said “You mean you actually do the ordering online?”<\/p>\n

He said “Yep.”<\/p>\n

I said “Ok, I’ll look again, but I didn’t see that option.”<\/p>\n

He said “Yep, that’s how you do it.”<\/p>\n

So I ride home and reconfigure my shoe from scratch again. I hit the “Review” button and up pops this error:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Eh? A non-specific error message? According to the message, the item is either unreleased (which I know is not true since I just saw it in person) or, whoa, they “reached their made-to-order limit for the day”???<\/p>\n

What?<\/p>\n

I don’t even know what that means. Why wouldn’t you just put my order in queue and manufacture it as soon as you can find the requisite child-laborers<\/a> to build it?<\/p>\n

So instead of putting my order through and shipping it to me when it’s ready, Nike instead gives me three options:<\/p>\n

1. Try again tomorrow when they’ve “reset their capacity”?<\/p>\n

2. Email<\/em> the design to someone… presumably with the accompanying note “Hey, look at what I can’t order from Nike!”<\/p>\n

3. Print<\/em> the design out so I can hang it on my wall and be reminded of how much I want it.<\/p>\n

I just don’t get it. I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of exactly why Nike would put such an error message up and I can really only think of one possibility: whoever designed the database and backend for this system built it so that it can literally only store X number of orders per day. This just seems ridiculous to me though as databases should theoretically hold an unlimited amount of data.<\/p>\n

Any ideas?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been a critic of Nike’s online presence since the first time I tried to find out about a shoe seven years ago and was greeted instead with a confusing Flash movie having nothing to do with shoes and leading me around in circles until I had to go to Google. “Design vomit” is what I call that stuff, and most things Nike did back then reeked of it. Over the last few years, the company seems to have gotten more web-savvy and now produces a good mix of design-driven and utilitarian interfaces depending on what the marketing goals are for any particular sub-site. Wanting to give them another shot, and needing a pair of running shoes…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,282],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-original"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}