How do you feel about vests? They seem to me like an in-between clothing item that I never know how to style, which is only right for a specific weather period that lasts two weeks a year. But a loved one can’t get enough of them. Yesterday they were looking for one online. Search behavior is different across people, for example, people can start their browsing journey by looking within a price range, condition (used vs new), or on a specific website (Vinted, Amazon, Facebook Marketplace). My loved one wanted a green vest and thought the New Yorker clothing brand might have something. I was surprised to see a lack of product categories in the website’s navigation, so nothing like pants, dresses, coats, shoes, and definitely no way for a potential buyer to specify if they’re looking for sneakers, boots, or kitten heels. The New Yorker clothing brand’s website only offered a gender distinction and the elusive named Products.
But we weren’t looking for products. We were looking for a dark green vest. A dark green vest that’d work well for days at the office and nights out, easy to layer for time spent outdoors having mulled wine in Viennese Christmas markets (titled the best in Europe, thank you very much) or weekend coffee shop dates in cozy places with a wooden stove (like Café Comet <3).
I’ve been watching Entourage, a 2004 TV show that follows around the character of Vinny Chase, a movie star, his best friends, and his agent. In one of the storylines in the first season, Vinny and his best friend/manager Eric meet the eccentric creative Billy Walsh. Billy is a film director who won Sundance, a prestigious film award, in his early twenties and now fully embodies the “brilliant jerk” archetype. One of Billy’s peculiarities is that he never calls Eric, Vinny’s manager, by his name. It’s always “hi suit” or “stay out of this suit.” Eric rejects the notion at first, that he is a suit, a Hollywood executive who’s money-hungry and failed their ethics class in uni. (I don’t think Eric is a suit.) In a meeting of the three of them with a journalist who’s writing a piece on their new movie (another of Billy’s peculiarities is that he hates hearing it called a movie, “it’s a film”), Billy shows up wearing a shirt that reads SUITS SUCK. Eric, Vinny’s manager, his best friend of over a decade, who lives with him and is so closely intertwined with everything going on in Vinny’s life (Billy likes Vinny, finds him real and raw), a funny, competent professional with integrity, is stripped of all of his history/identity with a “suit.”
The anonymity of suit is what came to mind now that I was writing about the vest search.
This is a common failure mode in information architecture, where the terminology customers see is too broad to be useful. (We get to this point because of the abdication of responsibility curse which plagues most companies, which I could write a whole ‘nother article about.) I’ll continue criticizing information architecture that favors generality at the expense of speaking the user’s language. Amazon currently lists about 600 million products worldwide. A product is a SKU and no one wants to buy a Stock Keeping Unit. They want to buy a dark green vest.
AI Policy: I personally write each draft and final copy on this website. All content reflects my own thinking, ideas, style, and craft. I do not use AI such as ChatGPT to generate articles. Occasionally, I ask AI such as Formalizer or Claude to summarize or restate my own ideas and may restructure sections based on the response.
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