Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

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.

Tags: Findability, retailing, UCDcommerce