Your customers can’t buy your products if they can’t find your products.
Here at Factor, we spend a lot of time thinking about and designing navigation for e-commerce. It’s the cornerstone of a great e-commerce experience. Great site navigation attracts and converts shoppers. It does this in a few ways:
- If you have a large product assortment, only a fraction of inventory will ever be visible at once. Executing navigation, taxonomy, search, and category pages well enables your customers to find and buy your products efficiently.
- Clear navigation gives you certainty about how your customers search and browse. Your analytics will be cleaner, making you better able to improve other aspects of the customer experience.
- The powerful, well thought-out taxonomy that fuels your great site navigation gives your team a simple, repeatable way to keep your products findable as your catalog grows and changes.
What goes into designing better site navigation experiences?
Great site navigation needs to be executed beautifully in search, taxonomy, on-page navigation, and category pages. In order to do that, we approach it from a research-oriented perspective followed by modeling and design based on what we learn.
- Qualitative User Research: We discover how your customers perceive your world so that we can build navigation, taxonomies, and product category pages that reflect those perceptions. When your site reflects your customers’ mental models, they can find and buy your products more easily.
- Navigation Model and Taxonomies: Using findings from user research, site analytics, competitor analysis, and your marketing objectives, we design the structure of navigation and product categories to reflect customer behaviors and align with user goals.
- Wireframes: We define the structure of the key pages of your site –such as product category and detail pages– to ensure that they contain the navigation and information necessary to help customers make purchases.
How do we approach this process?
At Factor, we work with you to create omnichannel experiences driven by how your customers see the world. Our practice is rooted in user research, which allows us to understand your customer’s perspective in order to design specifically for their needs.
We firmly believe that a successful customer experience is built on a well-constructed information architecture. As information architects and taxonomists, our expertise helps you build an adaptable and extensible foundation so you can improve you customer experience today and evolve it in the future.
We like to see information make it all the way to the finish line. From structuring information, to making it usable across systems, to helping you define workflows for keeping product data and content current, we work with you to ensure that all the people, processes, and platforms your business relies on function in harmony.
Have your own navigation challenge you want to talk through? Contact us!
