Last weekend I set out to build a shelf for G’s room. My main goals were to custom-fit it to a particular wall in her room, and to keep the cost low. I’d done a few shelves like this in our last house, using melamine boards from Home Depot or Lowe’s.

After sketching my rough plans, my usual next step is to drive over to Home Depot and look at what boards they have in stock. I then adjust my plans on the fly while standing in the store aisles. This time I decided to try doing that step at home, via the web. That way I could know the exact cost ahead of time, compare other stores’ prices, look at alternative materials, and decide whether to buy vs. build.

Home Depot’s site made this appallingly difficult to do. After 5 minutes of drilling down through vague category names, I gave up and tried keyword searching. That turned up a donut machine as the top result by relevancy for “melamine“, as shown in the below image. (The model number contains “MDF”, and MDF must be a synonym for melamine — but why is Home Depot selling donut makers anyway?)

I persevered and clicked through several pages of results on the Home Depot site, eventually finding the few different boards that I had in mind. The exercise made me think, though, that there is potential for a retailer that can provide a great user experience and great results for this kind of situation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 at 11:13 pm and is filed under musings, projects.