Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

Whether you are more familiar with the term guided navigation, attribute filtering, multi-attribute navigation or guided search (there are more although these are some of the main industry terms used) this type of advanced navigation can provide visitors to your e-commerce store/online booking system/content rich product site with an invaluable user experience – if implemented correctly.

What is multifaceted navigation?

In short this is an advanced navigation method where shoppers can filter out large sets of products or content by a variety of product attributes (sizes, colours, features, price range, specifications).

User benefits of multifaceted navigation

1. they can choose to be specific about the products which they are being shown
2. your users are empowered by the way you allow them to dynamically manage your product database
3. users can compare products by specific features, for instance when looking for a TV you can specify to see only TV’s that are 1080p and that are 46 inches
4. your users can shop how they are used to in a good high street store. ie. they tell the salesperson that they have so much to spend and are looking for particular product features or sizes, and they are then shown the products which suit their requirements
5. your user can find the products specific to their needs in a more efficient way, speeding up their browsing journey in what may well be a small space of time they have to shop online
6. your users don’t need to to visit multiple product pages and read each product description to know whether it matches their requirements
7. long, scrolling product listings pages (pre-product page) are eliminated as they can filter out the products which don’t match their needs
8. combined with the more widely used sorting techniques (price hi-low, price low-hi, latest, bestsellers, closest to your location ie. for a hotel) faceted browsing providers users with all the tools they need to hone in on the products/items which they are in a position to purchase
9. potentially confusing and bewildering amounts of products or items can be managed in a way which allows the visitor to focus their shopping experience on just the items which are suitable to them
10. users will reflect positively on the browsing experience with your website, in turn reflecting less favourably on your competitors who don’t provide this type of advanced navigation

Best practice advice

• Indicate how many products will be displayed when choosing a specific filter – users not only will get an understanding of your catalogue size but they will see whether by filtering by a particular attribute they will be narrowing their potential options too much to give them enough choice to make a buying decision
• Provide the ability to choose multiple filters across different attributes – this ensures that users have a truly dynamic and personalised browsing experience rather than only filtering a single attribute ie. colour or size
• Allow the user to switch filters on an off on the same user interface, rather than having to click back to be shown the different filters available for a particular attribute
• Encourage users to use this form of navigation with a clear, user friendly interface, rather than this form of advanced navigation being lost in a cluttered navigation menu
• Where applicable provide slider filters to allow users to specify exactly the upper and lower limits of a particular attribute they want to control, such as the lower and upper limits of their new house budget, rather than limiting them to specific tears of prices ie. £200,000 – £300,000
• Allow a user to select multiple filters for 1 attribute, allowing them to be even more specific in the features they are looking for within a range of products (whether this be clothes, insurance, holidays or houses)
• Don’t overlook the overall usability of your web application just to include multifaceted navigation – if implemented poorly these advanced navigation options can confuse and frustrate visitors

Typical web applications that benefit from multifaceted navigation

• E-commerce stores – selling a large number of products in each category range, allowing users to filter the products to focus in on what suits their budget and requirements
• Holiday, flight and hotel websites – users can input a variety of requirements (for instance, distance from beach, hotel star ratings, user reviews, near by attractions, distance to town centre) and see hotels which match these specific requirements
• Estate agent, housing websites – users can specify a variety of criteria (price bracket, number of bedrooms, distance from a local amenity, front or back garden, conservatory) and be presented with only the houses which satisfy the different criteria
• Price comparison sites – dependant on whether the user is looking for car insurance or their next mortgage, they can specify their unique requirements
• eCRM systems – where you are looking to filter out customers which match a series of requirements, such as contact method preferred, industry, annual budget and distance from a particular city

Examples of multifaceted navigation

Multifaceted navigation on Argos.co.uk

Multifaceted navigation on Hotels.com

Multifaceted navigation on Hotels.com

Multifaceted navigation on Uswitch.com

Multifaceted navigation on Skyscanner.net

Examples of where multifaceted navigation would significantly enhance the user experience

Kodak.com, a site which would benefit from multifaceted navigation

Currys.co.uk, a site which would benefit from multifaceted navigation

Homes4U.co.uk, a site which would benefit from multifaceted navigation

Mytravel.co.uk, a site which would benefit from multifaceted navigation

Advanced techniques to further enhance the users experience

• Maintain users key filter selections when they return to the site or begin their browsing process again, such as the price range that suits them or their preferred holiday destinations, for instance
• Where applicable provide sliders to allow for unique values to be chosen for the likes of price ranges, rather than having specific brackets of prices ie. £50 – £60
• Use interactive colour pickers as a more engaging way for your users to filter your product range.
• Consider user generated tagging, allowing your users to tag products/items as they see fit which in turn provides completely new attributes on which to filter content within your site

Further reading on navigation techniques and best practice

• tagging content and providing tag clouds to represent large sets of data
• suggestive/predictive search
• dynamic categorisation and shopping by user profiles and customer groups
• Navigation comparison between Kodak and Fujifilm

What are your experiences of multifaceted navigation?

I would really like to hear about your experiences, both as users, faceted navigation providers and from people on the client side involved in implementing navigation methods.

• How beneficial do you find this style of navigation?
• What sites do you feel are pushing the boundaries in navigation?
• What further user benefits would you add to the list above?

It was my 21st birthday the other day. As a July baby I was always blessed with the school year just finishing around my birthday so I didn’t have to go to school but I would have a chance to hand out my cartoon decorated invitations to all my friends. My birthday morning would always start with the frantic present opening with my family sat around half asleep. Then one by one the grandparents would stop by or call me up to wish me a happy birthday. My friends would all call at my house to personally wish me a happy birthday and treat me to the odd box of celebrations.
How things have changed.

I recently removed my birthday from Facebook (so that identity thieves couldn’t steal it) only to discover none of my friends were notified about my birthday. It meant that many of the people I would have expected to congratulate me, didn’t.

The fact of the matter is most of my friends and even some of my family members rely completely on web applications/networks to communicate with me and sometimes this can have pitfalls but all in all these are extremely powerful tools. Online retailers should be capitalising on the host of possibilities for strategically designed and placed selling applications which could transform the way we shop, communicate… and celebrate birthday’s!

I think many online retailers greatly underestimate the power and influence online operations can have to their business. Those who are profiting online, are those who not only have e-commerce stores that are user friendly, but intuitive and intelligent in equal measure.

Thinking back I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have an email account. Nor can I remember a time when I couldn’t get in touch with people from all over the world in a matter of seconds by simply opening up messenger or Facebook. I buy most of my electronic goods, books, and travel online and would never even dream about purchasing a product without reading reviews and checking out a few sites to gauge the sort of price I should be paying, whether I purchase online or not. Not mentioning the 30 plus sites I will check daily from news RSS feeds to bus timetables, cinema times, or downloading vouchers for the restaurant I’m going to that evening.

The extent to which this generation has grown alongside the internet means that not only are the consumers of today extremely internet savy but have very high expectations.

Many sites do not live up to consumers expectations

OK we’ve moved on a long way from the first generation of flat websites, but still some fundamental elements are being ignored by some of the major e-tailers:

• Getting the brand story from in-store experience to an online experience
• Technical issues such as slow loading page speeds or faulty links causing major dis-satisfaction and reduced conversation rates
• Poor navigation and lengthy purchasing process; consumers today will simply not tolerate this and leave your site and shop elsewhere
• Poor product images – there’s really no excuse
• Lack of innovation with available programs, applications and online communities such as 360 views, virtual tours, YouTube, Video Jug and social networking sites.

Finally and worst of all, I can still find some retailers who for reasons unknown to me have a complete lack of online presence. This can severely damage a brand and customer satisfaction.

With the fight for the consumers pound harder then ever and online spending on the increase (sales in the first quarter of 2008 are up 50% on last year, NMA 15.05.08) what better time than to address the usability and design of your website? Check out our website and range of usability services for more info

We have recently begun a business streamlining and modernisation process with a client, and running alongside our standard User Centered Design (UCD) process we are adopting the DMAIC framework.

The DMAIC framework is an essential guide in conducting process improvement projects, and DMAIC is used by Six Sigma Black Belts. It is an acronym for Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control.

What soon become clear when we conducted the pre-analysis of our clients business is that the combination of the UCD process and the DMAIC framework will provide us with an exceptional process improvement model which will deliver ROI on a complete range of Key Performance Indicators that will be affected during this project, from both our clients internal processes to their customers relationship with our client and their account management.

Below I have visualised how the UCD process and DMAIC framework will be used simultaneously by PRWD for this and many more clients.

I’d be interested to hear of any other software development and usability companies who are using UCD and DMAIC together during projects to deliver lean manufacturing processes for your clients.

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?