- Nick Iozzo <nick@neog.com>
- Product navigation within large E-commerce sites
- When designing the product navigation path for an e-commerce site, two
types of situations can exist. Products which are easily divided and
grouped in a hierarchical manner, and those that are not. Those products
that are not easily grouped provide a challenge to a designer regardless of
the number of products. Easily grouped products can challenge the designer
when they are part of a large hierarchy.
- For the sake of argument, we will say our large hierarchy in question has
over 10 top levels, an average of 7 links per node, and an average of 4
levels of depth. The challenge is to define a navigation scheme that will
constantly expose the user to as much of the hierarchy as possible. We want
the user to always know which items they can purchase and we want them to
get to those items easily.
- I do not propose we tackle the issue of products that are not easily
decomposed into hierarchies. These situations have to be handled on a
case-by-case basis. The solution to this problem probably goes beyond
standard design, it goes into the realm of user participatory design. e.g.
A card sorting method may solicit from the users an appropriate hierarchy.
- Based on some usability tests and experience I have on this topic, I would
like to constrain the design to the following conditions: the design must
run on both 3.0 browsers, the screens should be designed for a 640X480
resolution, and frames should not be used.
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