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?

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!

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?

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?

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.

Now back to the original post…

Comparing and researching hundreds of digital cameras to find your new companion for the next few years should be an enjoyable, user friendly and visually rich experience – here are how 2 of the major manufacturers, Fujifilm and Kodak, are providing significantly different experiences.

For anyone who may also be interested in researching cameras online, at the end of this post is a variety of sites I have found most useful, constructive and informative, along with some of the digital camera models I have been looking at.

What I expect to get from the manufacturer websites

1. Enjoy a more interactive experience, to take me as close to handling the cameras as possible without going to a high street specialist
2. Ensure that I am aware of the latest models available
3. Determine which digital cameras fit within certain budget and specification brackets

This is where I have experienced 2 significantly different user experiences which I felt compelled to write about here.

Fujifilm – Intuitive, Customer Focused and most of all Useful

Summary of the Fujifilm user experience

Utilising Ajax functionality to provide immediate product availability updates based on user selections, this product comparison tool allows users to quickly and intuitively update the products to show which ones fit within the users shopping criteria.

User experience benefits

• Product filtering controls displayed in standard web form format ie. simple checkbox buttons, to ensure immediate user recognition
• Users can filter products by key product data, such as price ranges, zoom levels and movie functionality
• Users see immediate page responses as they check the various options on and off
• Product comparison functionality has been included in the tool for an enhanced and more useful user experience
• Irrespective of screen resolution the tool fills the available space, rather than being fixed width and potential cutting off on smaller resolutions

Recommended user experience improvements

Although when you view the Kodak user experience below, it is clear that Fujifilm certainly have the competitive advantage, to further improve the user experience, flexibility of the tool and usefulness to the more serious photographer, I would recommend some of the following:

• Providing greater amount of filtering control, and group the controls ie. photo specifications (to include megapixels, max resolution, size of LCD, lens range, ISO sensitivity), phone specs (to include weight, battery type, storage types) and more special features (to include image stabilisation, face recognition)
• Expanding on this customisation and filtering, provide distinct user experiences for different camera user types ie. the casual camera user, the prosumer user and professional users – therefore a user, by perhaps answering 1 simple question, can indicate which type of customer they are, and the shopping tool can be tailored with specific product filtering attributes – again all this can be achieved on the same page using Ajax to provide a seamless and attention holding user experience
• Consider the use of slider tools, which allow a user to slide bars to specify ranges of a particular feature that they are interested in ie. choosing between 5 and 10 megapixel, or choose between 300 and 400 grammes for example). View an implementation that Amazon uses for its diamond search facility
• As a user hovers over a camera, provide a small window which features a snapshot of the camera, possibly featuring a snippet of an external review to further entice the user to consider the camera
• For more instant explanations of specific features, rather than clicking to view more info, again a small window could be displayed above the shopping tool

Kodak – Traditional Product Display, Not User Friendly

Summary of the Kodak user experience

Adopting a more traditional product listing style, Kodak allows the user to sort the range of products (all 70-80 of them) by one of the featured specifications (megapixels, zoom, display, memory, price).

User experience downfalls

• No ability to filter the products means that you are always scrolling up and down the list of 70+ cameras
• Price confusion – some products have prices, others doesn’t – does this mean the phone isn’t available or obsolete? Can I buy this phone online? What is the price I can expect to be charged by the retailer?
• With no product filters, significant scrolling is required to view products in the mid or lower ranges of your chosen sorted column
• There is significant amounts of duplicated product specifications, but with no filtering option I still have to read the details for each camera, even though its spec may be identical to the previous camera
• The user experience (and attention levels) are interrupted each time you wish to sort the list, as the site uses standard page refreshes compared to Fujifilm dynamic page updating
• There is no visual indicator as to which column the products are currently filtered by, which can be an issue if you are moving back and forth between specific camera product pages and this list
• No comparison facility, which is crucial when shopping for technology products, where slight difference in specifications can be a decision maker for lots of shoppers

Summary of my online shopping experience at Fujifilm and Kodak

1. Fujifilm are harnessing some of user experience enhancements possible with web 2.0 functionality
2. Kodak provide a more traditional product listing which requires significantly more time for a user to interact with and identify their ideal camera
3. Based on the above brand perception is much better for Fujifilm
4. I would be much more inclined to recommend Fujifilm to friends looking for cameras with specific specifications from the main manufacturers
5. One advantage Kodak has over Fujifilm is the integrated shopping experience, allowing you to purchase some of the cameras direct – again as mentioned earlier as this isn’t a facility offered for each camera it could in fact be detrimental to the brand and user experience – for instance a user may wonder why Kodak are willing to sell only some cameras direct
6. Although Fujifilm certainly have the competitive advantage over Kodak with their current shopping comparison tool, as I have idenfied there are further enhancements that they could make to create an even richer and useful tool for all levels of digital camera shopper

As promised, useful links for online camera shopping!

• Digital Photography Review – highly detailed, independent reviews
• Trusted Reviews – very comprehensive digital camera reviews
• Digital Camera Resources – more in-depth digital camera reviews
• Photography Blog – advertiser intensive but useful reviews

And some of the digital cameras I have been looking at…

• The Olympus SP560-UZ – the strongest contender yet for my cash!
• Fujifilm Finepix S9600
• Fujifilm S6500fd
• Olympus E-410
• Nikon D40

I would welcome your comments on any aspect of this post, whether its the camera models I am considering (and your recommendations), other manufacturer websites providing good or bad user experiences, as well as comments on my comments and recommendations.

The 5 questions that Dave asked me were:

1. What do you see as findability? Why is findability relevant to marketers?
2. How do you tackle findability in your usability projects?
3. What would you say are the biggest findability errors that e-retail sites typically have from a marketing perspective?
4. I know you’re a big advocate of card-sorting. Typically this is part of a heavyweight usability project. Is there any place for it in improve findability of an existing site which is not due a major upgrade.
5. When working at Littlewoods Shop Direct Group there must have been a tension between print-based design techniques for the catalogues and web-based design techniques. Can web designers learn from the catalogue merchandising techniques. Any tips and tricks?

Take a look at the full Q and A session, which from my commercial experience at Littlewoods Shop Direct is geared towards large multi-channel retailers.

Virgin Wines Case Study

I have recently completed a project to provide a very top level user experience concept for Virgin Wines, which provides a wide range of filtering options for the user as they determine which types/colours/price ranges/customer rating they would like to apply to the currently displayed bottles of wine.

Visually there a variety of ways of displaying the tools and filtering options for a user, but the over-riding factor to providing feature filtering is to empower the user with the knowledge that they are controlling the display of products, rather than having the site dictate to them how they will browse through the ranges.

Feature filtering is an area of user experience that I intend discussing and writing about on this blog in much more detail, and with my 6 years of online design experience at Littlewoods Shop Direct Group there are lots of examples which can be used for large multi-million E-commerce sites which should be of interest.