is a leading retailer that offers clothing, accessories, and personal care products for men, women, and children. Gap Inc. has more than 3, 500 stores all over the world. "Knowing we need to be where our customers are" is the company's main goal for success. One way in which the Gap Inc. accommodates it customers is through its web site. This paper will discuss some of the positive and negative aspects of their web site.
Clicking around their web site, I felt they had developed a very simple and usable site, although not accessible for everyone at the moment. Under the Customer Service /Screen Reader tabs, Gap Inc says, "Please be assured that we are working hard to make our site more accessible to customers with screen readers and talking Web browsers", which is a very positive option. .
Download time, always a number one concern for users, for this site is moderate. As long as the majority of the people visiting the web site are using at least a 56K modem, then download time is not a significant issue since it took my computer about 15 seconds to load and users lose interest after about 20 seconds. .
Navigating around the site is simple, when using a graphical browser. On the home page they have a twenty-five-option menu bar, bordering a picture of two ladies advertising Gap sweaters are displayed as graphic text with no alternate tags. When this page is viewed in a text-based browser such as Linux, the only thing the user knows is that a link exists but has no idea about where they are going if they decide to follow it. On every page of Gap's Inc. site, there is a graphical link to their home page. This is also helpful if you have a graphical browser. .
Once again, for all the VT100 users of the world, they have no idea where they are about to go if they follow the link because it always just says [link]. For them this creates frustration because it becomes confusing to try to test every link to decide if that is where you want to go.
