How should we optimise breadcrumbs on these pages?

[warcom]

This post is deleted!

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Paul,

I recently came across an article in this regard. Though its a bit old content, but provides good insights to breadcrumbs implementation. Hope it helps you. Here you go:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/17/breadcrumbs-in-web-design-examples-and-best-practices-2/

and here:

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/breadcrumb-navigation-examined-best-practices-examples/

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[DougRoberts]

Hi Paul,

Yes, I see your problem. Following the link it was not obvious to me where I was on your site at all.

I'd take a good look round at some of the industry leaders and see how they do things. Taking a look at Amazon isn't a bad start. They've got a great testing budget. (Word of warning though - don't automatically assume that what's working for someone else is going to work for you. Once you get the basics right you'll need to test.)

The first thing I don't get are the products appearing at the bottom of the page. Why are you displaying "Random ADSL Modem and Router". I don't see how that helps the customer searching for router. I don't think they'll set out with the intent to buy a "random" router - at least not to start with)

A "Featured" device also appears at the bottom - but I don't know why. Is it because it "Ships Today?" What confuses me here is that it also appears in the main listing with different shipping info "Usually ships within 24 hours". Which one is it?

I think having these items appear under the list navigation is what's making it so hard to see the next/previous, 123 etc. You expect these to be at the bottom of the list.

What's the default sort order here? It took me a while to see the drop down "sort by" option (possibly because of the recommendation feature graphics drawing my attention or the fact it's on the blue category title area.

I see on the "sort by drop down" that it's "normal", but I don't know what that means?!

It's best practice to give shoppers the ability to filter by price, customer reviews or age of the product etc. These mean I can order the list in a way that suits my intent and the things that matter to me as a shopper. If I'm shopping on price why make it so hard to find the cheapest / best value device! I'd really try to make this more obvious and move this into the list navigation at the top of the list. I think having the promo area between this drop down and the list isn't helping.

Once I've selected a filter (price low-high) I want to see the results. I'm not interested in the "Browse by" navigation of the features promo. The first thing I need to do is scroll down past all that stuff. Can you hide the promo if there's a custom search order selected?

On page 2 of the listing do you really need to display the Warcom recommends box again? I've already seen that and decided to ignore it. It's now just getting in my way and making it less obvious that I've navigated to the second page of the list.

It would be nice to have the list navigation at the top of the list too - right under the category name so that it appears above the fold. Here you can clearly display the number of items in the category and the page you're on. This will instantly tell me how many options there are and that I'm going to need to page through or sort of find the device I want.

I would make the list navigation stand out more - put it on it's own background colour to help people identify the navigation elements and make it bigger/bolder. You want it to be noticeable and easy for people to click through onto the next pages. (It can be tough for people to click on small single numbers - and try doing it on a touch-screen device!)

The other thing that confuses me a little is that there are LOADS of products that are marked as "Best Seller" (all by 2 on the first page of the listing). They can't all be the best seller can they? What's the purpose of marking them as the Best Seller - having so many doesn't help me choose. "If everyone's buying that one I can't go wrong if I buy it too". I'd suggest carrying out a test marking only 1, 2 or 3 items at most as best sellers.

If you want to get some real world evidence of how people see your site then using services like usertesting.com can be shockingly revealing!

Good luck and hope this helps!

Hope this helps.