Paul Rouke on User Experience

This article is Part 3 of 4 focussing on User Centered Navigation and Findability within PRWD’s E-commerce Platform.

Dynamic Categories and Shop by Situation

To reference the introductory article on user centered navigation and findability, “No two web users will exhibit exactly the same browsing behaviour when navigating an e-commerce site”.

Similarly, different visitors will have different reasons for visiting the site, and therefore their ’situations’ can be very different.

Dynamic categories centered around user driven situations and customer groups provide a unique way for our client to group products across their whole catalogue which suit the wants and needs of particular customers.

Using Persona’s to Target Groups of Customers

During the initial analysis phase of the User Centered Design process with Contact Packaging, it became clear that there were specific situations which their existing (and potential) customers are in. From here we were able to develop a series of persona’s to reflect the customers in these different groups, enhancing the effectiveness of the User Centered Design process that was underway.

With this customer analysis and persona’s we developed a method for Contact Packaging, using the PRWD tag engine, to create dynamic categories which specifically target groups of potential customers.

Objectives for Providing Dynamic Categories to Target Customer Groups

• There should be no limit to the number of customer groups that can be created
• Customer groups can be created and put live within 1 minute
• Customer groups should drive conversions from Search Engine Marketing campaigns
• Customer groups should be visible throughout the store, encouraging usage
• Customer groups should enhance the effectiveness of the tag engine, including the tag cloud available under the search facility
• Customers fitting any of the ’situations’ should be encouraged by how they are being recommended a range of products which may suit what they are looking for, which in turn provides a more personal and intelligent shopping experience

The key to the dynamic categories and shop by situation interactive tool is that it isn’t intend to suit all visitors, and even for visitors which fall into one of the situations, it isn’t expected that they will be interested in buying all of the product suggestions.

Instead, the shop by situation is intended to compliment the wide range of other navigation methods available, whilst providing a more intelligent and personalised way for visitors to browse products from a wide range of categories which may well match their buying wants and needs.

The 1st Step on the Ladder for Shop by Situation

The 1st iteration of our Shop by Situation functionality certainly meets all the objectives set out above, but from our business perspective this is simply the 1st step on the ladder for this type of functionality. As we strive to enhance user engagement and provide even more personalised product suggestions, the flexibility we intend providing our clients will provide even more intelligent ways to target customer groups and increase relevancy for these customers browsing the store.

Comments please…!

Have you seen this type of navigation method used? How effective do you feel this method of grouping products could be for different types of products? I’ll look forward to hearing any views and comments on this post!

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This article is Part 2 of 4, focussing on User Centered Navigation and Findability within PRWD’s E-commerce Platform.

Online Search

Search is used by a large proportion of web surfers, whether its from the Google homepage, an integrated search toolbar at the top of their web browser, or within a particular site, to name just a few examples.

Best Practice Tips for Search Implementation

As a quick summary of best practice when implementing search within a site, here are my top 6 tips:

• the search facility should be consistently placed on each page within the site
• the search facility should be highly visible and not part of a cluttered user interface
• the search facility should be located as near to the top of the site as possible, close to the brand logo
• the search facility should look like a search facility, therefore its styling should be minimal at most
• the search facility should be an intelligent, accurate and integrated piece of functionality, part of a wide range of findability methods provided
• the search facility should provide intelligent content or product suggestions as a user is typing out their search term

PRWD Search Providing Intelligent Product Suggestions

For modern, standard compliant web browsers, the PRWD E-commerce platform features our dynamic HybridSearch feature which, based upon user input into the search box, delivers dynamic product selections based on an algorithm developed by the Sam Clark.

The product predictions this provides are based on both wildcard and fulltext searching, and in line with the previous article on the intelligent tagging engine, HybridSearch also looks at all the tags associated with each product.

Benefits of Suggestive, or Predictive, Search

• Suggestive search provides links in realtime to actual product or information pages which exist within your website, minimising the amount of ‘no results found’ search result pages
• Suggestive search provides suggestions for products and content that actually exist within your website which the user may not have realised existed, therefore expanding the appeal that your sites content has for that person
• Suggestive search provides customer engagement and intelligent feedback, increasing the perception of the visitor that your site is helping its visitors to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible, speeding up their shopping journey
• Suggestive search can not only provide basic information for each result, it can also be implemented to display user centered information such as % savings, date of content, relevancy to your search term and other valuable information, providing increased amounts of sub-conscious triggers in which certain types of visitor behaviour will respond to
• Suggestive search adds a valuable navigational method to a sites findability methods, increasing the chances of a visitor quickly locating the product or content that best suits their wants and needs

With all this intelligence you can almost guarantee that if Contact Packaging sell the types of products you are searching for, the predictive search results will provide you with all the suitable products in the store.

In addition to each product suggestion containing a small image, the product title and the price range, an additional piece of product information shown is any saving that is available on any SKU for each particular product. This was a key addition to the product suggestion display as this provides the price conscious/sale hungry visitor with essential information to encourage a positive buying decision, which in turns is one of the ways in which persuasion architecture is used.

Persuasion Architecture Explored

For more of my views on persuasion architecture my user experience of House of Fraser talks about this area of user experience in some detail.

Continually Evolving PRWD HybridSearch Feature

As with the bespoke tag engine, the search feature will be continually enhanced to add greater power, relevancy, speed and sorting of content/product suggestions, and the search feature is something which will be implemented on a wide range of sites, both content driven, transactional and other business systems, such as account management facilities.

Following this post going live I will shortly follow up by talking in depth about the Dynamic Categories and Shop by Situation available at Contact Packaging.

Your comments please…!

I’m very interested to hear about your thoughts on the effectiveness of predictive search features, especially when users quickly type in their search string and hit return, without their being sufficient split second pause for the dynamic suggestions to be delivered.

Apart from the Google search toolbar, which sites do you feel are executing intelligent suggestive search most appropriately?

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Yesterday I attended the very engaging Forethought by Four event, part of the Future Culture series of events by Manchester Digital, the trade association for Manchester based digital and ICT companies.

This event was the kick-off for Futuresonic 2008, which is described on their site as:
“5 days and nights of live music, art premieres, exhibitions, club nights and events featuring a world-class programme of over 300 artists in 30 venues and spaces across the city centre. Futuresonic is an international festival of Art, Music and Ideas now in its 12th year occupying the orbits of both digital culture and music.”

Introducing Forethought by Four was Shaun Fensom, chairman of Manchester Digital, and he duly introduced the following 4 speakers:

• Justin Hall - CEO, Gamelayers, and a founder of PMOG
• Aleks Krotoski - blogger, columnist, podcaster, The Guardian
• Matt Jones - Founder, Dopplr
• Chris Heathcote - head of service & UI Portfolio for Nokia / anti-mega.com

Although all 4 speakers provided stimulating talks, with not a single bullet point in sight on each of their visually rich presentation slides, I was most engaged with the talks from Justin Hall and Matt Jones. Justin is a Founder of PMOG (Passive Multiplayer Online Game) which is, arguably, a model for the next stage in the evolution of web 2.0, and Matt the founder of Dopplr.

Timing is most definitely everything! - just a few seconds ago I received the beta invite for PMOG from Justin, who I chatted with at the end of the event (PMOG is currently in closed Beta with invite and queuing only). Thanks Justin!

Matt talked about the continual need for applications and services to allow people to upload personal information to the web, as a way of allowing us to share information with our friends and members of online communities. This he says makes information about us much more interesting when the data can be compared to other people around the globe or with similar characteristics and consumer habits.

Monitoring and Sharing Energy Consumption Data

Examples from Matt of uploading and sharing personal information and preferences were Last.fm and Muxtape, although Matt also talked about a new invention which sits in your home and monitors usage of all of a homes utilities (gas consumption, electricity usage, carbon emissions etc) with the ability then to upload this information to the web to allow you to see how you compare to other people and families in similar size houses as you. In turn this may identify ways in which you can adjust your day-to-day usage of utilities to be reduce carbon footprints and reduce energy bills.

What Now, Even More Social Networks?

Justin also talked about the vast amount of social media experiments being developed, pointing to the speed in which new prototypes can be pulled together and released for public consumption. An interesting idea to encourage usage of social networking sites is to offer rewards for people using networks, such as how Linked In provide you with a ‘Profile Completeness’ indicator, which just likes games provides encouragement to continually interact and add information onto the network in order to complete your online profile/persona.

With the amount of social media experiments and new social networks, Justin touched on user fatigue, with the classic case of having to input, yet again, your name, email, DOB, friends, contacts etc - the list goes on.. OpenId, although not directly mentioned in the talk, certainly is one great way to begin tackling some of this fatigue, and as expected PMOG provides this log-in facility.

New social networks will always have some users trying the service initially, but once that initial ‘buzz’ has gone its getting even more difficult to build sustainable, user rich social networks.

Information Overload - will any real work get done!?

Finally Justin mentioned Attent with Seriosity, an application which plans to address the information overload experienced particularly by corporate organisations - see how they describe the application:

Attent™ with Serios™ tackles the increasing problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful multiplayer online games and market economics. Attent creates an economy with a scarce new currency (Serios) that enables users to signal the importance of their outgoing email by attaching value. Recipients can use the Serios received to prioritize their attention to messages, and in return use their Serios to assign appropriate weight to their responses. Attent also provides tools to analyze and manage communication patterns and information networks in the enterprise.

Finally, a quick mention to Aleks Krotoski talk, where she emphasised the importance of trust and customer engagement, in particular for e-commerce stores. This really struck a cord with me especially with the recent launch of our e-commerce platform, where trust and engagement have been two of the key areas addressed for launch and more importantly will be integral areas of focus as part of the continual evolution of the platform.

All being said this was a really interesting event put on by Manchester Digital - its just a shame the attendance wasn’t as strong as the panel and talks merited.

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This article is Part 1 of 4 articles focussing on User Centered Navigation and Findability within PRWD’s E-commerce Platform.

Navigating with Tags

Tagging content to allow users to navigate through a site isn’t a radically new technique, but in particular for e-commerce sites there aren’t currently many examples of where this style of user centered navigation is provided.

For v1.0 of the PRWD E-commerce Platform it was essential that we developed a tagging engine which would provide both our client and shoppers on their site with an intelligent way in which to group, browse and filter products which share similar characteristics.

To give a few examples…

1) Customer Needs To Protect Their Goods

They may be looking for materials which will protect the goods which they will be transporting from their warehouse to their customers business

Traditional E-commerce Navigation

Products which will potentially match these requirements could be located in 3 or 4 different categories, which using traditional navigation methods of browsing categories and sub-categories would make locating them fairly difficult and require a number clicks.

Intelligent PRWD Tag Engine Solution

Using the tag engine, Contact Packaging can specify which of their products, across any categories, fit into this customer requirement and assign the tag ’surface protection’ to each of them

Resulting Customer Findability

By clicking on the ’surface protection’ tag, customers will automatically be presented with all the products across the store which fit this description, providing immediate solutions to whichever type of protective materials they are looking for, whether its bubble wrap, polyethylene foam, hand stretch film or profile foam.

Take a look at the tag results for surface protection within Contact Packaging

2) Customer Needs a Variety of Tools

A warehouse manager may be looking for a variety of tools to be used within various parts of the warehouse, such as strapping tools, tape dispensers and tensioners

Traditional E-commerce Navigation

The customer may try and search for tools and hope that any tools across the site have been indexed with the word tool, and usually this would mean that the word tool would need to feature in the actual title of the product

Intelligent PRWD Tag Engine Solution

Using the tag engine, Contact Packaging can specify which of their products, across any categories, fit into this customer requirement and assign the tag ‘tools’ to each of them, irrespective of whether the product actual states that it is a tool in either its title or description

Resulting Customer Findability

By clicking on the ‘tool’ tag, customers again will automatically be presented with all the products across the store which fit this description, providing immediate solutions to whichever type of tools they are looking for

Take a look at the tag results for tools within Contact Packaging

3) Customer Needs Similar Products

A customer may have browsed to a product page from any of the navigational methods available, and then realised that the product they are looking at isn’t quite what they need

Traditional E-commerce Navigation

The customer can hope that there is an intelligent ‘related products’ feature on the product page which will show them other products more which better suit their needs, or they may perform a new search or try browsing a different category

Intelligent PRWD Tag Engine Solution

Tags which have been added to a particular product are provided on each product page, so along with the related and cross sell products functionality, customers can see what tags have been assigned to that product

Resulting Customer Findability

The customer can click on the tag which best fits with their requirement and then automatically be presented with all other products throughout the store which share this characteristic. It is then expected that the customer can quickly scan the products are decide which of them better fits their requirements.

Continually Evolving PRWD E-commerce Tag Engine

The above examples are specific to the Contact Packaging e-commerce store, but the same tag engine concept works across any size and complexity of e-commerce store (and content driven or business system platform), and in fact this method of navigation is even more useful when there are larger sets of products or content.

As the PRWD E-commerce Platform continually evolves following the launch of v1.0, the intelligence, flexibility and scope of our tag engine will be greatly enhanced to provide an even more powerful and robust way to group, filter and browse products and content.

User generated tags, although not deemed applicable for Contact Packaging, will also be introduced which will add a new dimension to how visitors can personally tag products and browse products based on user-generated tags.

Tags and Multi-Faceted Navigation

Although multi-faceted navigation hasn’t been included in the Contact Packaging e-commerce site, for much larger e-commerce sites we would regard this as a fundamental user centered navigation method. There are very exciting and powerful ways in which out tag engine interacts with and compliments a multi-faceted navigation system and this is something that I will be talking about more in the article on PRWD’s multi-faceted navigation system.

Your comments please…!

I’m very interested to hear about your thoughts on the effectiveness of tag clouds and tags in general as a way of navigating through a sites content by related attributes and meta data. How do you implement tags to assist users in navigating your site content? What % of users interact with tag clouds and related tags? How do tags work alongside your multi-faceted navigation system?

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Following on from my initial post introducing PRWD’s new E-commerce Platform, my first in-depth look at the intelligence and flexibility which were fundamental aspects of the launch e-commerce site will focus on:

User Centered Navigation and Findability

No two web users will exhibit exactly the same browsing behaviour when navigating an e-commerce site, unless they are forced to by only having limited ways in which to search for products (such as categories & subcategories, a search facility and perhaps some use of cross selling during a shopping journey).

Although the actual number of products in the Contact Packaging store isn’t substantial (around 70 for launch, but with around 400 SKU’s), in order to provide user centered navigation and assist in a visitors findability we have provided a wide range of ways in which a visitor can browse for and locate products which match their wants and needs.

Best Practice Navigation and Findability Methods available include:

• Standard categories
• Dynamic categories
• Suggestive search
• Tag clouds
• Related products
• Cross sell products
• Shop by situation
• Best sellers
• Sales products
• Breadcrumb
• Products with related tags

Are we heading towards the longest article known to the blogosphere!?

It is at this point I begin wondering how long this article could end up, if, as I originally intended to, I now begin talking in detail about each of the findability methods listed above. Not to mention me wondering whether anyone will have the stamina (and time) to read and digest the information!

In order to keep this article to a more digestible length and focus on some of the more intelligent aspects of the stores navigation, I will assume that methods such as standard categories, related products, cross sell products, best sellers and sale products are fairly familiar with most people, as these form the primary and secondary ways to navigate most e-commerce websites.

Therefore I will focus my next few articles on:

1. tag clouds using the PRWD tagging engine
2. dynamic suggestive search using PRWD HybridSearch
3. dynamic categories/shop by situation
4. multi-faceted navigation

Following this introductory post going live I will shortly follow this up by talking in depth about the PRWD tagging engine.

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