Posts Tagged ‘heat maps’
Building a navigation.
Website navigation, I feel, is pretty crucial. Although there are great search technologies available, I think that it’s best for a shopper to find what they are looking for within a click or two from the home page. That’s why we’re building what we hope to be a very precise and easy to use navigation system into our framework.
Using both text and images, pretty much our whole offering should be readily available from the front page. It’s taken us a while to really work out the details, but we feel that we’ve created a navigational system that is both easy to understand and easy to follow.
I don’t think that a lot of e-commerce sites really put a lot of thought into their navigation system. After looking through some heat map testing, we see a lot of web user’s going straight for the search. This is really a double edged blade, in my opinion. On the one hand, the good news is that the average web user is well versed in internet technology and uses, they know what a search is. However, on the other hand, it also means that they didn’t see what they where looking for when they got to the page. This is probably a good indication that a site’s bounce rate (how many users bounce off the page) might be high, and really could be avoided.
So far, I’m pretty happy with the nav system we are working on. In essence, it’s a project unto itself, and we’re finding really exciting ways of changing an old system of looking for something, into a new system of finding something.
