https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/04/the-current-state-of-e-commerce-filtering/

• Тезисы

Christian Holst is the co-founder of Baymard Institute where he writes bi-weekly articles with their research findings on web usability and e-commerce … More about Christian Holst …

When done right, filters enable users to narrow down a website’s selection of thousands of products to only those few items that match their particular needs and interests. Yet, despite it being a central aspect of the user’s e-commerce product browsing, most websites offer a lacklustre filtering experience. In fact, our 2015 benchmark reveals that only 16% of major e-commerce websites offer a reasonably good filtering experience.

Given the importance of filtering, we — the entire team at the Baymard Institute — spent the last nine months researching how users browse, filter and evaluate products in e-commerce product lists. We examined both search- and category-based product lists. At the core of this research was a large-scale usability study testing 19 leading e-commerce websites with real end users, following the think-aloud protocol.

Despite testing multi-million dollar websites, the test subjects ran into more than 700 usability problems related to product lists, filtering and sorting. All of these issues have been analyzed and distilled into 93 concise guidelines on product list usability, 35 of which are specific to filtering availability, design and logic.

(View large version)

We subsequently benchmarked 50 major US e-commerce websites across these 93 guidelines to rank the websites and learn how major e-commerce websites design and implement their filtering and sorting features. This has led to a benchmark database with more than 4,500 benchmark data points on e-commerce product list design and performance, of which 1,750 are specific to the filtering experience. (You can view the websites’ rankings and implementations in the publicly available part of the product lists and filtering benchmark database).

In this article we’ll take a closer look at some of the research findings related to the users’ filtering experience. More specifically, we’ll delve into the following insights:

1. Only 16% of major e-commerce websites provide users with a reasonably good filtering experience. This is often due to a lack of important filtering options, but from the benchmark data it’s clear that poor filtering logic and interfaces are also causal issues.
2. 42% of top e-commerce websites lack category-specific filter types for several of their core product categories.
3. 20% of top e-commerce websites lack thematic filters, despite selling products with obvious thematic attributes (season, style, etc).
4. Of those websites that deal with compatibility-dependent products, 32% lack compatibility filters (for example, selling smartphone cases without a filter for device type or size).
5. Testing showed that 10+ filtering values require truncation — yet 32% of websites either have insufficient truncation design, causing users to overlook the truncated values (6%) or use what testing found to be even more troublesome, inline scrollable areas (24%).
6. Only 16% of websites actively promote important filters on top of the product list (a prerequisite when relying more on filters than on categories).
7. Filtering performance varies greatly by industry, with electronics and apparel websites generally suffering from insufficient filters (for each of their unique contexts), while hardware websites and mass merchants take the lead in the filtering game.

In this article we’ll walk through each of these seven filtering insights, showing you the usability test findings, examining the benchmark data and presenting best practice examples for creating a good e-commerce filtering experience.