1. Claire Lewis Bronze

    MD at TruffleShuffle.com

    15 January 2010 14:54pm

    Avatar-blank-50x50

    Hi all,

    We are in the early stages of a homepage re-design and can't seem to agree on whether we should go for a dropdown/rollover menu (like ASOS, Marks and Spencers etc) or stick with a vertical list of our various product categories (like Amazon) for customers to navigate through the site. 

    Half our staff prefer the drop down style mainly because from a design point of view, it looks neat and sophisticated however the other half find them difficult to use and more often than not, buggy, which is obviously a concern so we're stuggling to make a final decision. (Personally - I'm in favour of the traditional vertical list as I'm part of the group that find them difficult to use and prone to errors.)

    Anyway, we're a fairly small retailer so would only be talking about 20 or so product categories per gender but we can't seem to find any definitive research/test results or articles to say which option is better in terms of conversion rates.

    Can anyone help us get to the bottom of which is best?

    PS Apologies if this has been tackled elsewhere but couldn't seem to find a relevant post?

    Claire

    www.truffleshuffle.com

     

     

  2. dan barker Bronze

    E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker

    15 January 2010 18:11pm

    dan barker

    hi, Claire,

    I have to say I think your current nav is pretty good right now. (but that's just personal opinion). Outside of the 'left/top' navigation discussion, there are a couple of small tweaks you could make to your current nav to improve things. Get in touch if you'd like more detail. Anyway - on your main question...

    Here's a 'best of both worlds' approach you could take:

    • 1. Keep your left nav very similar to the way it works right now.
    • 2. Extend your top navigation to consist of these categories: Men, Ladies, Kids, Browse by Genre, Accessories.
    • 3. When someone rolls the mouse over those top categories, show their subcategories as a dropdown. (with your number of subcategories, you could probably keep these to 1 column per subcategory - see ebuyer.com for an example).

    That adds dropdowns for people who prefer them, loses none of your current functionality, and doesn't add any confusion.

    The other nice bi-product of that is it puts you in a great position to test 2 things:

    TEST ONE: WHICH MAKES MORE MONEY?

    Do you make more money from customers who use the top nav?

    If you turn off the top dropdowns, do you make any less?

    If you hide the left nav on the homepage, do you make any less?

    You could run all of these as A/B tests, or simple 'turn it off & see what happens', 'turn it back on and see what happens' tests.

    TEST TWO: SHOULD YOU GO FOR THE FULL 'ASOS'-STYLE NAV?

    Once you have those single-column top navigation items, it's easy to run a test expanding them out to multiple columns to see what impact that has on sales/new visitor conversion/aov/etc. Run some simple usability tests through something like usertesting.com at the same time & you'll have a good picture of what works for you.

    Finally - I agree with you on fiddly dropdowns. Some are a pain to use, but I think that's often to do with individual implementations rather than the idea itself. eg, the aforementioned ebuyer.com and johnlewis.com feel very smooth & solid. Don't accept a buggy solution if that's what your developers present first.

    Hope that's useful,

     

    dan

    --

    http://www.linkedin.com/in/djbarker

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