Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

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?

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?

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.

I am absolutely delighted to announce the 1st phase launch of PRWD’s bespoke e-commerce platform, UCDcommerce, with our 1st client to use the platform being one of our long term clients, Contact Packaging.

The e-commerce site, selling a complete range of packaging materials and supplies, from masking tape and bubble wrap through to cardboard boxes and stretch wrapping machinery, has been designed by myself and developed by one remarkable technical architect and developer, Sam Clark. You may like to read Sam Clark’s initial thoughts on the e-commerce platform.

At this stage you may be wondering ‘why develop a completely new framework and platform when there are so many existing e-commerce providers out there?‘.

And my answer, as user experience director of PRWD, is this…

Our clients, both existing and potential, demand a scalable, best practice driven, intelligent and user focused e-commerce platform on which PRWD can develop bespoke e-commerce solutions to revolutionise their business online.

To give an example as to the type of e-commerce platform which may have supported this answer, our 1 main consideration was becoming a partner with Elastic Path, who have developed E-commerce Software which is used by the likes of Samsonite and Bond & Bond. BTW having looked at these 2 e-commerce sites I must stress they don’t follow our principles on e-commerce findability and user experience, but they may be worth a look all the same.

Complete control over the evolution of our E-commerce Platform

Rather than the partner route, our commercial decision was to develop a new framework (fortnum) and in-house platform, to ensure we had complete control of how the e-commerce platform would evolve, in key areas such as:

• customer intelligence
• CRM system integrations
• user functionality
• user engagement
• embracing and integrating with new technologies

The launch site is only the very start of what will technically be a continually drive in tackling the areas above, and in user experience is just our 1st interpretation of what will drive online sales for this particular client.

There are currently some known usability flaws which need addressing, of which I’m sure other usability professionals will recognise, but with this e-commerce store being in its launch phase there will be scope and budget to address them going forward.

In time I intend posting articles explaining the user centered design process that was adopted during this 1st development, with features on particular areas of the site including:

• user centered navigation and findability
• user engagement
• learnability
• consumer browsing behaviour targeting
• addressing security concerns
• the best practice driven checkout process

Comments please…!

I welcome comments from any readers of my blog and other usability professionals and technical architects and developers - and most importantly comments from online shoppers!

I’ve spent almost half of my working today with Steven Quinlan, a final year student at MMU (Manchester Metropolitan University). Steven has been studying Business Information Technology, and I first met him a couple of months ago at MMU during an open day, where Manchester based digital businesses met with students from MMU with the aim of showcasing both the types of creative industries operating out of Manchester and the opportunities which exist for graduates.

On first speaking with Steven, his passion for User Centered Design and human computer interaction struck me as being a breath of fresh of air. Here is a guy that has spent the last 3 and half years studying a variety of subjects from Digital Marketing to Information Systems Strategy, and rather than developing a real passion for the more creative aspects of digital marketing, Steven has developed a genuine passion in the same areas as I did around 7 years ago - usability, user experience and user centered design.

Steven will be the 1st to admit that his experience to date has very much been in the theory behind UCD (User Centered Design) and HCI (Human Computer Interaction), and the 3 hours we have spent together today, where I took him through some real world projects of UCD that we have been working on at PRWD, certainly provided Steven with a much sharper sense of the commercial implementations of these processes which Steven knows in theory.

What really excites me about Steven is that not only does he have a genuine passion for user experience, he is very much starting early in seeking a potential career in this field. Whereas the majority if user experience professionals have spent years building their knowledge and understanding in this field, and perhaps have moved into Usability from quite different roles during their careers, Steven is at the very start of his career and already has the kind of passion and understanding which may well provide him with a fantastic foundation to excel in this field.

During the following months I have offered Steven the opportunity to shadow me whilst I deliver User Centered Design processes for new clients at PRWD, where Steven can be ‘in the trenches’ as I work with clients to work on the analysis, design, implementation and deployment stages of UCD. As you may expect Steven has taken me up on this offer!

Looking forward, irrespective of whether Steven’s aspirations and career changes direction during the next few years, I have fully enjoyed spending time with him and sharing some of my experiences. Perhaps one day he will be be one of my energetic, dynamic members of staff at PRWD, only time will tell!