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Product Catalog Design Guidelines
Maes et al. (1999), based on traditional buying behavior research, identify six fundamentalstages in the buying process: (1) need identification, (2) product brokering, (3) merchant
brokering, (4) negotiation, (5) purchase and delivery, and (6) product service and evaluation.
Product catalogs facilitate the first three stages. To better understand the use of catalogs one
should take into account the goals and tasks of consumers that mediate the search for a product.
The model in
Figure
14-4 describes the way an e-Customer interacts with the e-Shop while browsing or searching
in order to locate products of interest. This part of online shopping is of great importance, not
only because it is an integral portion of actually buying, but also because it determines user
impressions and first-level assessment of the e-Shop they have come to contact with. Users consume
most of their time during this task and use the feedback from this process to decide whether they
will go on with the payment or leave their shopping cart at the cash register and exit. E-Shops
suffer from this phenomenon but after all, the Internet is an impersonal, remote and extremely
competitive world, which may prove both a blessing and a curse. In order to get the most out of it,
customers must be kept satisfied. In the browse/search phase, satisfaction means that the customer
should walk through as few states as possible in
Figure
14-4 before—hopefully—ending up at the bottommost left state (i.e., proceed to payment).
Failure to locate the item(s) means one customer lost and a hard to estimate spreading of disrepute
for the e-Shop.
Figure 14-4: e-Customer
browse/search model (a revised version of Krug, 2000, p.
56)
An efficient product catalog facilitates easy and fast product identification. The
next section discusses the
features that when implemented according to each special case requirements, assure catalog
efficiency.
Catalog Positioning
According to one of the primary rules of Web design, a
Web site’s home page should vividly express the purpose of the site. Specifically for e-Commerce
sites, the value of this guideline is enormous. The most straightforward way for an e-Store to
indicate its purpose is to place products right on the home page (just as conventional shops place
products in their windows). Therefore, guideline number one is that the products catalog should be
featured on the home page of the e-Store. More over, it should be either appearing or be one click
away from all e-Store pages, thus enabling easy and fast shopping. It is, though, important to
point out that apart from the product catalog, links to information about charging, return policy,
shipping, credit cards, and delivery should also be available on the home page. The rationale
behind this guideline is that in many cases before searching for products to purchase, users may
wish to find out whether their credit card is accepted, or that the e-Shop sends products to their
country of residence, or that the product can be delivered by a certain date.
Classification Scheme
Constructing an effective catalog classification scheme is not an easy task and it is one of
the parts of setting up a successful e-Shop that requires knowing customers well. Product
classification should be useful to the customers, helping them locate products without moving
forward and back in the hierarchy. Nielsen et al. (2000a) claim that “what
constitutes good classification depends on the intended market and how familiar consumers are with
the subject matter of the site.” There are cases where classification based on brands
makes sense (e.g., in a tennis equipment e-Shop) and cases where it is absolutely senseless (e.g.,
in a flower e-Shop). Or it may be the case that a classification scheme that is useful for some
customers it proves rather cumbersome for others, usually due to issues of internationalization,
age, profession, sex, culture or education. A solution to such problems may be the support of
multiple classification schemes (with links pointing to each scheme from the home or an upper-level
page of the e-Shop) and also where appropriate classification of items in more than one of the
hierarchy categories. Both ideas can be easily implemented online and are a good deployment of the
trivial hypertext conveniences (i.e., cross reference linking).The optimum input for deciding on the scheme to apply is the customers themselves. A typical
method for acquiring this valuable knowledge is the card short technique (Pearrow, 2000, pp.
63-69). It is one of the simplest yet most useful techniques since it requires little time to
complete, and few resources but can offer valuable insight helping designers and e-Shop builders
understand how customers (intuitively) expect to find the products organized in categories. After
having implemented a classification scheme, usability testing may be applied to indicate further
modifications (rearrangements in category listings or additional product references).In many cases, e-Shops deploy advanced technologies and features for presenting the
classification of products (such as Java or Flash) but this can cause problems when a browser does
not support such features, or when the connection bandwidth is low and cannot afford long
downloading periods.Before closing the classification topic, it is important to note that prior to deciding on an
effective classification scheme, there is a crucial issue to consider: does the e-Shop under
consideration really require product classification? The answer to this question depends mainly on
the number of available products. When this number is small, it is much more efficient to list
products in alphabetic order without any grouping. Direct product listing is quite appropriate
especially for products customers like to browse, as they can access a product and see details by
clicking on its name and by one click (backwards) return back to the complete product
list.
Product Presentation Inside Categories
Once a user has chosen to enter a catalog category, the displayed page contains all products
that belong to the specified category. At this point it is crucial for the customer to be able to
see what the product looks like. Depending on the kind of the product advanced visualization
features and tools may as well be required. For instance, when the product type is running shoes,
it is important to provide multiple views from various angles, details about available colors (even
the ability to preview the product in the various combinations), and size information. Concerning
sizes, e-Shops should provide for internationalization by taking into account for instance that US
sizes differ from EU and provide either all size formats or a size conversion mechanism.
Information on product availability is also crucial and should be available at a visible spot,
since it is a factor that may affect the final buying decision. In general, the type of information
appearing for each product listed in a category page depends on the product itself. Designers
should keep in mind that customers expect one more level of detail for each product: the product
page itself. Thus the product category page(s) are not required to list all product details (nor
are they recommended to). They should though contain the kinds of information assumed to be
affecting the comparison among products of the same category. After the user has decided upon a
product, there is the product page—just one click away—to answer all specific questions and provide
a much bigger image.One of the primary design issues raised when it comes to product category pages is how many
items should be listed. Is it better to list all category items at once (resulting in a long and
slow page the user has to scroll) or to limit the number of products on each page up to a maximum
that usually ranges between five and 20 items (but make the user request successive pages for the
complete listing)? Both approaches face the user abandonment threat. In the former case, the single
but long page may take too long to download. In the latter, the user may get tired of clicking on
successive “next product listing page” links. Thus the guideline can not be very specific.The final design decision should depend on the kind of merchandise, the amount of information
on each product and the estimated downloading times (bearing in mind that users’ delay tolerance is
usually around 10 seconds). It is important though to note that users may be a bit more patient if
the page starts appearing soon (even if it takes a while longer to complete). In general, a
complete category product list should not take more than three page requests and users in the case
of product listings expect to scroll down and do so without nuisance. Note also that in order to
make sure that the user will scroll down to the bottom of the page and will not miss the last
product listed, it is useful to place at the top of each product listing page the total number of
products included. By increasing the number of category products listed per page, the e-Shop allows
the visual comparison of more products, thus enabling a trivial process for making a buying
decision, either online or off-line.
Tools and Functionalities
When an e-Shop sells a wide variety of products (e.g.,
Web marts), the information load the customer has to handle until locating the product(s) of
interest may be “unacceptably” heavy. Thus consumers need additional tools to answer fast and
correctly their product enquiries and speed up their decision making process. Such tools comprise
filtering tools, comparison tools, search utilities, as well as customer community tools.
Filtering tools. They are used for narrowing a large item
set down to the subset that satisfies a number of additional criteria. Nielsen et al. (2000a) refer
to this category of tools as winnowing tools, where winnowing
literally means the separation of wheat from chaff (but more generally, the separation of useful
from the non-useful). This process is similar to the option “search within search results” offered
in some cases along with trivial search and is the further refinement of the returned results set.
The set of criteria that can be used by consumers for the filtering is predefined by e-Shop
designers and depend on the product distinguishing features, as well as the set of similar products
the e-Shop has to offer. Typical criteria comprise price ranges, brands, colors, sizes, and
performance characteristics (i.e., speed, capacity and more).
Comparison tools. Apart from filtering, there are cases of
products that are difficult to compare even when the list of all similar products, along with their
values for the criteria attributes, is available. Thus the customers’ decision making has to be
further assisted using comparison tools. Comparison tools typically offer summarizing tables with
similar products on one dimension and features on the other and make it easy to compare them on a
feature-by-feature basis. In such settings it is important that the e-Shop allows the customers to
specify the products to be compared. In certain cases where each product may have a lot of
attributes, it may prove important to allow the customer to also specify the features upon which to
base the comparison. There are even cases where the product to be purchased is made up of many
separate components, such as a PC, where the comparison may regard alternative configurations
(combinations of components). It goes without saying though, that regardless of how useful such
decision support tools may prove in the case of large e-Shops, they are a diminishing factor for
user satisfaction and efficiency when they are not well-implemented or are available in shops that
do not need them (products are either few or not comparable).
Search. Web users are familiar with the notion of
searching and browsing through search results. Thus search is a provision they expect to find
available and visible on all pages, so as to resort to it whenever in need. The general guideline
is that search should operate the way customers expect it to. It should be tolerant to minor
misspellings, allow for synonyms and string keywords, return an easily interpretable results page
and link to product pages. The “No results” page should also clearly indicate lack of returned
results and where possible provide a way for customers to refine their search until they succeed
(provided that the e-Shop has the product(s) of interest available). Search is indeed a big issue
and would require a chapter of its own in this book to be covered properly. Relating thought to the
online product catalog, search should be regarded as the feature that must be provided in
combination with the catalog in order to be a reliable alternative tool to customers for locating
the products of interest, compensating for a poorly designed catalog or a customer that cannot
“afford” to navigate through the product classification hierarchy (Figure 14-4
illustrates the close connection between catalog browsing and searching). A remarkable finding of
Nielsen et al. (2000b) is that if users don’t find what they are looking for on their first search
attempt, the odds that they will succeed in their search decrease with each subsequent attempt.
This observation imposes a quite demanding requirement for e-Shop designers and builders to
“create sophisticated - but simple - search engines capable of delivering
the goods on the user’s first search query.”
Community tools. Information such as customer opinions
about a purchased product or product ratings by experts is useful for customers, as it is regarded
as less biased (compared to product features as described by their manufacturers or traders).
Moreover, ratings and in general recorded opinion of other buyers or experts is a positive sign for
e-Shop credibility. If an e-Shop is used by other customers then it has been tested, and if
customers return to it and submit their opinion about products, then they are positive about the
shop (regardless of their positive or negative opinion about the product). In fact, it is a proof
that a customer community has been shaped around the specific shop and this is a plus to its
professionalism and trustworthiness and communicates these virtues in an indirect yet clear way. In
many e-Shops, such ratings appear on the product pages and not on the product category pages. It is
though much wiser, to provide visual rating indications (ticks or stars, for instance) on the
product listing in category pages because this way customers can use them as a product comparison
factor. Textual comments on the other hand—due to space constraints—should better be placed in the
product category pages.
