Working on Your Site Navigation?
If you raised your hand (virtually speaking), this blog is for you.
Site navigation is a key component of a site’s Discovery Architecture. On a retail site the navigation should move a customer from wherever they enter a site towards purchasing a product or service. While a straight line might be drawn between a potential customer’s entry point and a specific product, that is not always the most profitable route.
I’m not talking about cross-sells and up-sells here. I am talking about getting a higher shopping cart conversion rate for the same product.
Product-Oriented Navigation
There are a lot of sites “out there” that tend to structure their navigation around the characteristics of the products they sell. This is making the huge, and potentially costly assumption in missed sales, that people coming to the site know what they are looking for well enough to describe it.
That’s not always the case. This morning I tried to find information on fixing a leaky faucet. Go to a home repair store and look at the navigation. It’s relatively easy to find faucets. If you do a search for “faucet repair” you actually get some leads on one site – but I wasn’t sure if they were the right ones or not. (I am not a handyman.) That same site also has some good How-To articles – but they are hard to find on the site.
Sites such as these would benefit from putting themselves into the shoes of their users and start not with a list of product categories, etc. but give me, the user, a chance to decide what I want to do before overwhelming me.
User-Goal Oriented Navigation
A site that has much to recommend it is AutoZone.com
On that site, they pay attention to why the customer is coming the site – instead of overwhelming me with a long list of product categories and characteristics. Their assumption is that I am coiming to the site because I want to “do it myself.” But they are also aware that I might be new to an area and looking for a repair shop or might be a professional looking for a part, etc. Each scenario or user story implies different needs.
The left hand navigation is also user-goal focused…
By the way, I just have to show you how they help with troubleshooting!
Don’t you love it!
Now imagine one of the home repair stores might look if they followed the same route….
A User-Goal oriented Navigation System (slightly expanded) might look something like this:
- Shop for New Appliance and Accessories
> By Room
>> Kitchen | Bathroom | Living Room | Storage Closets
Make A Repair
> How-To Guides
>> Types of stuff
>> By Room: Kitchen | Bathroom | Living Room | Storage Closets
> Part ListsStore Locator
Customer Service
Store Specials in Your Area
Loose Ends
Okay, a couple of more points before closing…
In this entry, I’ve focused on the second of the three elements of a successful Discovery Architecture – that is, a strategy for moving people through a site towards a specific goal.
I haven’t mentioned implementation details…and I won’t in this blog. That’s a big topic
I also haven’t discussed is how to evaluate whether one approach is better than another. Obviously, web analytics plays a huge part here. A question to consider is which analytics should you pay attention to. This is also a big topic but here’s a thought to ponder. Instead of looking at the whole site, consider looking at slices of your site for key products and services. Some questions to consider are: Are people moving through the site and getting to these products/services? What paths are they taking? Identify paths that have higher shopping cart conversion rates than other paths. What do the higher success rate paths have in common? How do they differ from the less successful paths? What does this tell you about a) user goals? b) user understanding of your site’s navigation c) user behavior — all in relation to your site’s navigation.
BTW, I told my wife about my project to fix the dripping faucet. Her reply? “Call a plumber.” Wise woman!
[...] you want to see an example of this, read my blog on AutoZone and then visit their site. On their site, once you select a vehicle, it “remembers” [...]