Best practices

Browsing works best when there is a well-organized taxonomy of products that users can navigate logically. It should start at the highest level with broad categories and as one traverses the hierarchy downwards, should be more fine-grained and specialized until the user has a limited set of products to browse.

This is where filters (also known as facets) come into play, allowing the user to limit the products in their chosen category by a number of features.

A common question is: what should delineate the difference between groups, and what should be a filter? In general, products that perform a different function would be grouped into their own categories (for example, laptops, shirts, air conditioners, etc.) while attributes of the products would define the filters (for example, color, size, brand, pattern, screen size, square foot coverage, etc.) This rule can be tweaked in certain situations where it makes sense from a marketing perspective (for example, a new technology might make sense to break out into its own category to increase its visibility and for SEO purposes), or where the function and attribution are easily conflated (for example, a gaming laptop could be considered both a function and an attribute).

A common way of allowing navigation through a hierarchy begins with a drop-down or fly out menu that shows at the least all of the highest-level categories, optionally showing some or all of the lower-level categories, depending on the depth and breadth of the taxonomy. Users can click any one of the categories and either see all of the products in that and all child categories or be directed to select another level down to refine their search.

Standard UX guidelines dictate that there should always be a way forward and a way back for users and with that in mind, it is good practice to provide a set of links that allow the user to navigate easily backwards/upwards through the hierarchy in case they’ve gone too far or taken a wrong turn. This is usually referred to as a breadcrumb.

Filters are often displayed preceding or down the side of a page to help a user refine their search and limit the list of products they’re viewing. This is especially important for deep and/or wide catalogs where a large number of similar products are available, such as marketplaces. For this reason, it is critical that products always have the highest quality data available, since without that the filtering will not work as desired. Constructor has a number of methods of helping you with your product data quality beyond the catalog management capability used to upload.