Refinements are an important part of navigation, as they help narrow a broad category so visitors get to items they’re looking for more quickly – and also help them get to particular items to suit their needs such as size, brand, style, or price faster. There is no shortage of options for how to present navigation refinements, which means some retailers offer too many choices or they present refinements in a way that confuses the visitors. Below are a couple of tips to guide you in this area. You can find a whole slew of refinement tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” now available from our website.

Next week we’ll cover SEO, so stay tuned.

1. Consider using sliders for continuous refinements Test the placement of refinements – Using sliders for refinements like price or size range take up less space and are a nice tool to use along with AJAX to build smooth transitions from one information display to the next. Some visitors may find them more complicated than the alternatives – links or drop downs with fixed ranges, or text boxes allowing you to specify an upper and lower limit. So test and make sure your visitors do understand how they work and consider offering alternatives. Make sure your sliders work well on a touch screen device, and if they don’t you can  provide alternative way of displaying them.

2. Make sure navigational images can’t be confused as products – Navigation usability tests were conducted by showing participants a retail site with three product subcategories represented by an image and the associated text description. Many participants misunderstood that  the images were representations and took them to be three product images and assumed there were only three products. You should try to avoid these types of misunderstandings as much as possible. You can minimize confusion on navigation pages by showing products as well as subcategories. You can show other cues that will help differentiate between subcategories and products – such as showing the number of results they’ll see if they click on the subcategory images, label the subcategory images clearly and make sure there’s a clear distinction between the layout of your products and subcategories.

There are companies that guarantee 100% uptime – a bold claim in anyone’s book, but what is this claim really worth? It would be an impressive feat to achieve – but I would be surprised if any provider genuinely managed to achieve this lofty aim.

In our experience we have used providers with such guarantees, and then had downtime despite the promises. This is when you realize that the important part of the uptime guarantee is what the provider offers when things fail despite the promises.

SLI has learned over the years that each component of a system can fail, see our recent blog post The Story of the outage That Wasn’t on how we have enhanced our approach over the 10 years we have been in business. SLI has multiple servers, in multiple locations with multiple hardware, network, and DNS providers to provide resilience when items fail.

When making decisions about your providers, it’s important to look further than the uptime promise. The better providers admit that failures happen and plan for these contingencies, they have transparent communications and are always working to improve their systems.

Most e-commerce sites, and even non-ecommerce sites, have customer ratings and reviews. The ratings give people a quick view at how well a product (or content) has fared among people who’ve already purchased it, and ratings offer a more detailed explanation of a product’s pros and cons. If you’ve already gone to the trouble of having this content on your site, you should maximize its value by making sure it’s included in your site navigation. There are many ways you can go about this, depending on the lay-out of your site and the products or content you feature.

To get you started, below are a couple of suggestions to consider. You can find more by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips” which we just released last week. And be sure to check back, as we’ll post more tips from the Big Book in the coming weeks.

1. Show ratings and review information in the navigation — You can add ratings and reviews as part of the product information displayed on the navigation pages. This highlights early in your customers’  interaction that you provide ratings and reviews, and it’s also good practice to show the number of reviews for each product to illustrate which products have reviews and to help put the ratings into perspective.

2. Provide options to navigate through reviews — If you have a lot of reviews for some of your products, it can be cumbersome for your visitors to read through them. To help your visitors find the information they’re looking for efficiently and improve their user experience, you should offer ways to navigate through the reviews. For example, you can help them quickly access the positive reviews. You can see in the Abe’s of Maine example that the site allows visitors to navigate reviews by pros, cons, best uses and to sort by newest, oldest, highest rating, or most helpful. This is extremely effective, and reduces the amount of steps visitors will take before making a purchase decision.

The relevance of the search results is critical to helping your visitors find the products they are looking for quickly, as well as keeping them browsing to increase the order values.

Last week, Mark Brixton, Country Manager for Australia, sat down with Phil Dobbie from BNET Australia to discuss 10 things ecommerce sites can do to keep their site search performing efficiently. Mark explains that site search accounts for 30-40% of a site’s revenue so there’s a huge benefit to making search a priority. Mark also highlighted the fact that etailers should be continuously monitoring their analytics to understand visitors’ behavior on the site and particularly within the search. You can listen to all of Mark’s tips on the BNET site: http://www.bnetau.com.au/blog/aussierules/10-ways-to-improve-your-on-site-search-btalk/8381.

For more tips on how to improve your site search and navigation, download our e-books:

• Big Book of Site Search Tips
• Big Book of Navigation Tips

The rugby world cup is coming to New Zealand next month and the biggest news story recently has been about the price of the All Black jersey. The jersey retails for NZ$220 in New Zealand (about $182 US dollars), but can be bought from our customer, World Rugby Shop for just US$89.00. The New Zealand public has been outraged and there has been a backlash against Adidas who have failed to justify why there is such a huge difference in price. I’m sure our customer has benefited greatly from the publicity.

I suspect that Adidas’s market research indicated that Kiwis would be willing to pay more than the rest of the world for their team’s jersey. However somehow Adidas neglected to take into account the Internet. At best this was naive. And they now have a lot of work to do to rebuild the damage to their brand, although they’ll probably sell more jerseys as a result of the publicity, even though it’s negative.

The broader question is what should Adidas have done and how should manufacturers set prices around the world? Should there be a global recommended retail price? If I look at the price of an iPad in NZ it is about 30% higher than in the US. I think most of that difference is due to the US dollar dropping significantly in value since the prices were set. In my mind there shouldn’t be a significant difference in price. You have to assume that the consumers know how to use the internet and will find out and the market research should take that into account.

If Adidas had set the price a little higher in the US and significantly lower in NZ then they would have sold less jerseys in the US and more in NZ, but they probably would have made more money overall and they wouldn’t have damaged their brand. However, they wouldn’t have got this publicity, so there may not have been as much interest in the jersey. Obviously international pricing is difficult to get right.

What do you think? In the meantime I’m going to go buy one of those jerseys from our customer.

Our latest e-book – “The Big Book of Navigation Tips” – is now available for download from our website. We crafted the tips, taken from our many years of experience in guiding clients in search and navigation best practices, to help others in the industry understand how simple tweaks in navigation can significantly improve site usability. Similar to the “Big Book of Site Search Tips” we offered last year (and which is still available on our site), we wanted to shed light on the challenges site owners face in presenting content and information in a visually appealing way, while also guiding visitors to the items they’re most interested in. As we discuss in the book, good navigation is an art rather than a science – and while there are no black and white answers to how to approach particular elements, there are guidelines you can follow to understand what might work best on your site. Ultimately, as we discuss in the book, whatever approach you take, it’s important to do some testing to see if you’re really getting most value or if something else might work better.

Over the next several weeks we’ll post a couple tips from the book here on our blog, so be sure to check back frequently. To get us started, below are the first tips from the “Site Navigation Design” category. If you’re interested in seeing all the tips at once, just go to our download page.

Make site search and site navigation consistent

Visitors should only have to learn one interface, so keep the feel of the site search and site navigation similar to ensure a seamless browsing experience across your site. Too many retailers use different practices for site search and site navigation pages, resulting in different designs visitors have to learn to find the information they’re looking for.

Provide different ways of ranking products on navigation pages

You should offer your visitors a way to easily reorder the products they see on a navigation page. Even though they might choose to rank by least expensive, best rated, or most recent, you should propose a default display that is most advantageous to your business – for example, the most used default options are “Most Relevant” or “Most Popular.” You should then allow visitors to reorder by options they prefer, such as best sellers, most expensive, most clicked on, newest, or highest rated. These options should be featured at the top of the navigation page. Once visitors pick a new order, you should remember their preference, to avoid frustrating them, and cause potential site abandonment.

Allow visitors to navigate throughout your site from any page.

This may sound obvious, but visitors may enter your site in different ways: from an Internet search engine, directly from your homepage, from special offers or ads on another website or from a link on a blog. It’s important to show visitors where they have landed on your site, and allow them to navigate to other pages without having to start on your homepage, no matter which page they land on. Once they’re on your site, provide a navigation bar and include it on all the pages so visitors can easily browse from page to page.

The 2011 Multichannel Merchant (MCM) Awards are out, and we now know which are the top 10 retail sites with the best search and navigation. It’s great to see such an influential industry publication drawing attention to sites with outstanding usability features where good search and navigation have a clear influence on higher click-throughs and conversions, lower site abandonment, and improvement in brand loyalty.

We were also excited to see that 3 of our own clients were called out on the list – including Folica, The Pond Guy and Century Novelty. These 3 sites were recognized for the ease with which people can find products and other content on the site and the overall look and feel. You can find more specific attributes that were highlighted in the article: http://multichannelmerchant.com/photo-gallery/2011-mcmawards-website-top-search-navigation/index4.html.

Congratulations to all the winners!