This month’s UETips (from uie.com) includes some reasearch notes about categorization on several large e-commerce sites. I’ve included the text of the message…

How does a site containing thousands of pages of content get users to

the content they seek quickly? There are many different strategies for

organizing content on sites and we recently took a hard look at five

of them.

We’ve been examining several e-commerce sites to see how they

handled the problem of categorizing large numbers of products. We were

interested in seeing if the different designers came up with different

methods and which methods were most effective.

Our recent apparel and home goods study turned out to be a good place

to start. Here we looked at thirteen different sites, each with a

similar product set.

Every site had some similar characteristics. First, they divided the

content into just a few top-level categories, such as “Women”, “Men”,

and “For the Home”. (Apparel is one of the few content types that

lends itself to such easy organization. Sites containing content such

as office supplies or support problems probably have to adopt

different top-level solutions, such as what Staples

[http://www.staples.com] has done.)

Also, they had similar pages that displayed pictures of all the items

within a given category. We call these pages product galleries. While

the number of items and the specific information that was presented

with each product image varied, all of the sites had basically the

same galleries.

What was different were the pages between the home page and the

galleries. We call these “department pages”, because they represent

what’s sold in a specific store’s departments. For these sites,

“departments” were categories such as women’s swimwear or table linen.

Among the thirteen sites we studied, we found five different

department-page designs. Most listed the departments in a left

navigation panel, with the galleries for that department listed in the

center. (Look at Macy’s department pages–http://www.macys.com–by

clicking on Women, then Tops.)

However, some got clever. For example, the Gap and Victoria’s

Secret (http://www.gap.com, http://www.victoriassecret.com) both used

a menu based department that wasn’t a separate page, but instead used

menus at the top of the screen.

Old Navy (http://www.oldnavy.com) used a combination department and

gallery page where sometimes the left nav contains galleries and

sometimes it contains products. (Try clicking on Girls, then

Accessories. Compare that to clicking on Girls, then Skirts &

Dresses.)

Lands’ End (http://www.landsend.com) used a design that had both

product descriptions and departments. (Click on Women’s, then

Swimwear to see their department page design.)

Finally, Eddie Bauer (http://www.eddiebauer.com) combined text lists

of all the products in the department with a toggle to see the

pictures for a gallery. (Click on Women, then Sweaters. Click on View

Photos to see a specific gallery.)

After realizing that there were five basic types, we got very excited

about seeing if the different types made a difference. While we’d

expect differences between individual sites, it wasn’t clear that we’d

see if an entire type of design outperformed others.

After watching people shopping on the sites, we compared their

behaviors. (As with many of our e-commerce studies, these users came

to our facilities with a list of products they wanted to buy. We gave

them the money to make the purchases and told them to purchase as much

on their list as possible. In this particular study, there were 44

users who shopped for a total of 687 products.)

Studying the different designs on apparel and home goods sites turned

out to be a good thing. Out of the 687 shopping expeditions that we

observed, users only used the search engine 22% of the time. That

means that 78% of the time they used the categorization scheme to

locate their desired products.

We found the sites with the standard left-nav design, such

as Macy’s, actually performed the worst, selling the least

amount of product. Lands’ End’s design performed the best, with Old

Navy’s combination design being second.

It turned out, in our study, that the number of pages that a user

visited before they put something into their cart was inversely

proportional to purchasing. The more pages they visited, the less they

bought. (Remember, our users knew exactly what they wanted and were

ready to make a purchase.)

When you look at the number of pages visited before a user put

something into their cart, users who traveled through Lands’ End’s

design purchased by visiting half the pages than users through Macy’s

design. Lands’ End’s design had fewer visits to “wrong galleries”–

galleries that didn’t contain the user’s desired content (often

forcing the user to hit the “back” button–a clear sign of a

problem).

If you compare Lands’ End’s design to Macy’s, you see some

interesting differences. By just looking at Macy’s ’ “Women’s Tops”

department to Lands’ End’s “Women’s Sweaters”, you can see that Lands’

End goes to great length to let people have information they need to

make a decision. They give categories, such as “Twinsets”,

“Cardigans”, and “Cashmere”.

Whereas Macy’s just lists “Sweaters”. Visiting the sweaters gallery

shows every sweater Macy’s sells, with no distinction between the

types of sweaters or fabrics used. Users have to look at each sweater

to determine if it’s what they are interested in.

With the Lands’ End design, users could either go straight to a

product that was of interest to them or look at the category’s gallery

by clicking on a “View these and more” link. While a lot of our users

clicked on products, many viewed the gallery before choosing their

product.

The Lands’ End design can serve as a model for other types of

content. We could see job listing databases, news stories, or other

large content repositories using a similar design. For example, we

wonder if A.G. Edwards’ In Focus story page

(http://www.agedwards.com/public/invedu/infocus) could benefit from

this type of design? We think it might.

<code>(To be fair, A.G. Edwards has done a great job on the launch of
the new design. We feel a little guilty about picking on one page
out of many -- but it is such a great example of the particular
problem we're talking about. We just hope the great folks at A.G.
Edwards will forgive us.)</code>

The pictures on Lands’ End’s department page were helpful sometimes

and ignorable the rest. Seeing a picture of a “twinset” helps identify

what it is, whereas the pictures of “Fine Gauge Cotton” and regular

“Cotton” could be swapped and nobody would probably notice or care

(except Lands’ End’s buyers). This means that content that doesn’t

lend itself to pictures (such as diseases) doesn’t really need them–

it’s not a necessary part of this specific design.

As we study the differences in the designs of these department pages,

we can learn more about how to design information displays that are

more effective to getting users to their desired content.