It’s funny, when I was randomly picking a parts website in school (electrical engineering), Digikey gave me much better vibes. I mean look at their websites!
One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware engineers in a room and telling them “we need to put our catalogue online!” The other looks like it has been infected by “UI” and “design” and other non-engineering concepts.
> One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware engineers in a room and telling them “we need to put our catalogue online!” The other looks like it has been infected by “UI” and “design” and other non-engineering concepts.
1. I'm not sure why you think UI and design are not engineering concepts. If people can't figure out how to use your product then it's useless.
The home pages have a search box & drop down menus at the top, product menu on the left, carousel in the middle. Then some featured products, some featured manufacturers and a footer.
A product category has a bunch of combo boxes for filtering plus a table showing results. The results tables are almost exactly the same except Mouser freezes the left columns. Both have a lightbox popover for the product image.
Product pages both have photo, specs, number in stock and pricing. The only thing possibly offensive about Mouser's is that the sections on the pricing page are collapsed.
If nothing else, Mouser has one enormous usability flaw (which has been an issue for years): you can't sort by price.
Or rather, they will let you sort by the "pricing" column, but the effect is to sort parts by their unit price at whatever the minimum quantity for that part is. But some parts are orderable in single quantities, and others only in large trays or reels.
Even if you manually filter out those packaging types, it can often be the case that part A is cheaper than part B at qty 1, but significantly more expensive at (say) qty 20. So you can't actually do price comparisons without paging through the entire list, which may be many hundreds or thousands of pages depending on what you're searching for..
Digikey does the much more sensible thing, which is to let you enter the quantity you actually want, and sort items by what their unit price would be if you order that quantity. Mouser has a similar box to enter the quantity, but it only affects the display of each row, and not the actual sort order.
The big problem with Mouser is that you can't sort by quantity in stock. That's a very useful cue, one that DigiKey has always supported, and it has absolutely resulted in sales going to DigiKey over Mouser when in the planning stages of a new project.
I will heavily second this opinion. I'm not an electrical engineer, but I do prototype some electronics that eventually become products. One of the most important factors to me when selecting an individual component is that it will be available in volume in 6 months time and I don't know of a better way to estimate that than to look at the current quantity on hand. If I'm comparing two similar looking parts and one has 8000+ on hand and the other has 68, then I'm going for the 8000+ part.
They even both have a near identical locale selector, with two big flags, when you visit from a Canadian IP. Makes me think one... drew inspiration from the other.
Can you offer some examples? I just went to each site, and compared their home page, product listing table, and product page. They are so comparable in design/UI (to the point that it feels like any time one makes any change, the other probably follows suit) that I have no idea which one you consider to be afflicted.
Not sure how you arrived at this conclusion. Mouser and Digi-Key are nearly identical in terms of UI. Search functionality on top followed by products & manufacturers and a list of products on the left.
I'm with you on that second point though - both websites look like they were designed by hardware engineers rather than "omg-UI-UX-is-so-important" SWEs.
One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware engineers in a room and telling them “we need to put our catalogue online!” The other looks like it has been infected by “UI” and “design” and other non-engineering concepts.