Fwd: UIEtips: Strategies for Categorizing Categories

Thought the list might find this interesting.

Norman


>UIEtips -- 5/7/02
>Strategies for Categorizing Categories
>
>--> Feature Article: Strategies for Categorizing Categories
>
>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.
>
>     (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.)
>
>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.

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