Kicking Over My Traces

This is the third in a series of posts looking at findings published in Paco Underhill’s books on shopping (see below), in order to understand how these findings might be applied to websites. After the series was announced, subsequent posts in the series have appeared weekly.

The first in the series discussed giving visitors a reason to return.

The second in the series discussed interception rate, one way to measure interaction with customers.

The discussion point for today: Display Windows.

Mr. Underhill points out that successful retailers make good use of display windows, first, to draw customers’s initial attention; second, to draw customers into the store. He also emphasizes that displays are never seen under optimal conditions: if the message to be conveyed is not big and bold and short and simple and memorable, your effort is wasted.

What does “display” mean in an online context? How can websites create a good “display window”?

The obvious answer is a website homepage, and a lot has been written about good homepage design. I recommend starting with Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir. Mr. Nielsen has a bias towards text content which I think is a bit overdone these days, but his suggestions for usefully organizing a homepage are solid.

If you stop with your website’s homepage, though, you’ve stopped way too soon. Most people won’t come to your site through your homepage. They’ll land on interior pages through a referral from another website, or by clicking on the result of a search. In retail, that’s rather like the single-minded customer heading to the pharmacy at the back of the drugstore to pick up her son’s asthma medication refill. She doesn’t see the rest of the store until the medication is paid for and she’s pointed toward the front door. Is your signage taking that into consideration?

In the case of a website, when a visitor lands on an interior page you want to present them with a cohesive view of the site in terms of design and ways of getting around. In particular, it’s a Very Good Thing to let them know where they’ve landed: “crumb navigation” is useful.

Crumb navigation frequently takes a form similar to this:

Home > Book Lists > 2006 > 01 > 03

The visitor is four levels down from the website’s homepage, viewing a booklist for January 3, 2006; and he can click on any of the links to reach a higher level. (None of the example links is live.)

Note that such crumb navigation is in addition to links that might jump “horizontally” from one interior page to another.

A visitor to your website should always be able to tell where is he in relation to the homepage, and the purpose of the currently displayed webpage. Quickly. Without a Flash™ plug-in.

Three good books on general website usability concerns:

• Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen (though again, I think he leans a tad heavily on text content);
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug;
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville (more geeky than the others);

Even if you’re going to hire a website designer — and you want a website designer, not just a graphic designer — you should be aware of the issues involved.

Do you have another suggestion? Let me hear about it! Post a comment below, or send me email.

UPDATE (02/12/2006): a solid source on website design: Web Design from Scratch.

This series of posts is based on Paco Underhill’s books on shopping:

For my purposes, the second book, Call of the Mall, added nothing pertinent to the first, Why We Buy. My advice to web-only retailers would be to read the first and ignore the second.

See you next week for article #4.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 12:25 am +0000 GMT and is filed under Books, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.