Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

One of the most interesting things that can happen in times of recession is that innovative ideas cease to be optional “nice to haves” and become essential to business survival and recovery. The failure of old ideas means that finding new ones to replace them becomes ever more important.

Something we try to do here at PRWD is to keep on top of the developments that might affect us and our clients. One of these ideas is ‘Vendor Relationship Management‘, or VRM. This is a proposed business model that would enable retailers to access far more detailed information about their prospective customers than at present, but only with the explicit consent of those customers, leaving both parties in the arrangement better off. This idea has the potential to undermine the competitive advantage that the largest retailers have in their elaborate data-gathering and data-mining operations, making similar (and even better) data available to even the smallest retailer. It also has the potential to enhance customer security and privacy, which is still a key concern for many shoppers.

At present, it’s still a long way off widespread use. But keeping on top of these ideas is something that we’re committed to doing, so that when the technology shift occurs, we’re able to take advantage of it and share that expertise with our clients.

I was recently interviewed for the O’Reilly GMT blog on the subject of VRM, and you can see the resulting video here:

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?

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!

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?

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:

Attentâ„¢ with Seriosâ„¢ 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.