dria.org

Every once in a while I stumble across some random bit of a web application that honestly causes me “surprise and delight”. Today was one of those days, and the thing in question is the shopping cart at the Panic.com Apparel store.

The concept is basic, simple, and brilliant — create a shelf at the bottom of the page to which the user can simply drag the items she wants. If she makes a mistake, simply drag the items off. When finished, there’s a nice obvious “Check out” button. It works extremely well, and they’ve gone so far as to add size bubbles to the items in your cart so it’s easy to check that you’ve selected the correct sizes. Very nicely done.

Here are some screenshots. First is the clear shelf:

This is dragging an item on to the shelf (you can’t see it, but my mouse pointer was over the little transparent t-shirt):

The last is dragging an item off the shelf — instead of just disappearing, it actually vanishes in a poof of smoke (exactly like the OSX dock, if you were wondering). Again, my mouse pointer was in the middle of the little poof of smoke there but my screencap cleared it:

Anyhow, kudos to the panic.com designers. I really like your shopping cart.