The visual design of one product versus another

Th ese considerations aff ect the visual design of hammers only somewhat. If you
search for “hammer” on www.homedepot.com, you’ll get a hundred diff erent
results. Th is may sound like a lot, but there are many diff erent types of
hammers for many diff erent situations. Th ere are classic hammers, for driving
and removing nails; there are ball-peen hammers, for shaping metal; and there
are shingling hammers, for installing and removing shingles. Th ere are even
items that are hardly hammers at all, such as mallets, which have much larger,
blunt heads, and post drivers, for driving fence posts into the ground. Th ere are
hammers that compete with each other in materials (some of them milled
entirely of steel) or price (some are only $2, while others are $50).
But you’ll see a very modest degree of variety in the visual design of hammers.
Contrast this with shoes, another very simple invention, with a very simple
purpose, for which there is tremendous variety in terms of visual design.
Zappos.com sells over a thousand diff erent brands of shoes, each with a wide
variety of styles. Sure, there are diff erent shoes for diff erent situations, just as
there are diff erent hammers for diff erent situations, but many of the diff erent
styles of shoes are available in several diff erent colors.
Clearly, there is a diff erence in the importance of visual design when selling
shoes compared to when selling hammers. Th ere are a variety of explanations
for this discrepancy. For one, shoes wear out. Even if a person owned only one
pair of shoes at a time, each person would go through dozens of pairs of shoes
over a lifetime. Hammers tend to last longer – depending on how much you
use a hammer, it might last your whole life. Also, shoes are something we use
every day. Many of us may not even own a hammer.
But there’s a fundamental diff erence in the way that we interact with shoes:
Shoes are much more closely attached to our personal identities. We wear them
directly on our bodies, and we walk around with all the world seeing our shoes.
Shoes are part of fashion, and although fashion is fl eeting and, by its very
defi nition, arbitrary, it’s the primary reason we have