Ecommerce User Experience Vol. 02: Homepages, Navigation, and Product Comparisons

Homepage and navigation structures can communicate, organize, and prioritize a retailer’s offerings. Customers run into problems when they can’t tell what your site sells, can’t find the products they want, or can’t decide what to buy. This report helps you present the right amount of information and organize it well.

This 186-page report contains 62 design recommendations based on our user research. Discussions and 199 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings. 

Topics

• Best practices for homepage design
  • Create a good first impression
  • Keep customers on your site
  • Sell and build trust
  • Introducing your website as a great place to shop
  • Show what you sell
• Finding (navigating to) products
  • Classification systems for ecommerce 
  • Facilitating direct navigation
  • Creating differentiating category names and useful groupings
  • Including photos, policies, and promotions in the global navigation
  • Why every retailer needs a Bestsellers category
• Product comparison tools and tables
  • When to offer extra decision-making help to shoppers
  • How to design and present comparison tables
  • Avoiding common product comparison mistakes
  • Providing consistent and comparable product details
  • When to use static vs. dynamic (interactive) comparison tables

Research Method

The information in this report is based on five separate rounds of ecommerce studies for this and the previous four editions of this report. These studies included a mix of the following methodologies

• One-on-one usability testing
• Diary-based longitudinal study
• Eyetracking
• Expert review

Representative users tested 350+ ecommerce websites. The studies took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, India, and China