Ecommerce User Experience Vol. 05: Search, Filters, and Routing Pages

5th Edition

Search
• Topics:
Search
• Search

Part of Series: Ecommerce User Experience

You can’t sell a product that your customers can’t find. 

This report focuses on routing pages: search results, product listing, and category pages. Routing pages help customers discover and explore a retailer’s product selection, and they are crucial in helping shoppers decide what to buy.

In addition, this report covers search and filter design in detail. Your site must accommodate all types of searches and return relevant results for categories, products, and product characteristics.

This 444-page report offers 139 design guidelines based on our user research. Discussions and 500 screenshots and chart illustrations supplement our findings.

Even though some of the design guidelines are specific to searching for products, many of the guidelines apply to all forms of search and listing-page design, including content sites and intranets.

 

Topics

• Finding products
  • The role of routing pages in the purchase process
  • When to use category pages and when to avoid them
  • Traditional category pages vs. new hybrid category pages
• Search behavior
  • Why shoppers search
  • What they search for
  • Query length and types of keywords
• Best practices for search on ecommerce websites
  • Placement and presentation of search
  • Accommodating different lengths and types of searches
  • How to design search suggestions, including complex designs that incorporate promotions and products as users types
  • Interpreting and supporting the query
  • Providing advanced and scoped searches
  • How to handle single-result and no-result queries
• Designing search results and product listing pages
  • Names and details of products
  • Photography: What types of images to include
  • Style and color options
  • Ratings and promotional tags
  • Sorting products
  • Pagination and loading products, including infinite loading and Load More buttons
  • “Quick” features: Quick Look and Quick Add-to-Cart
• Faceted search and filters
  • What users expect and need from filters
  • How to design filters
  • Filter functionality

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 studies
• Eyetracking
• Expert review

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