Remember the “invisible gorilla” selective attention test experiment? If not take a minute to watch the Youtube video. In that video a test subject was given a simple instruction: count the number of balls being passed by a particular team of players. But there was also another team of players passing another ball, which made it extra difficult to keep up with counting the target passes. At the end of the video, the subject was shown the correct answer, along with being asked whether they saw the gorilla come across the screen. Many never even saw the “stage gorilla” enter the set, beat its chest, and then exit the set.
Unfortunately as much as we humans like to think that everything within our range of sight is perceived and processed on the same level, that is not true.
The takeaway for ecommerce merchants is that if there’s too much happening on the store site, especially when it’s not directly relevant to the shoppers’ needs, a re-organization is in order–otherwise, customers become too distracted and overwhelmed to find the products they want and simply leave.
Take a look at the screenshot of Lowes‘ homepage pasted below. Let’s imagine the shopper who comes to this site looking for a chainsaw; where would they go? Most of the “above the fold” real estate is occupied with non-product information and the tabs aren’t really helpful either. Below the fold, there are some rows of feature products, but none of those happen to be chainsaws.
Based on what we said in the first paragraph, it might be safe to assume that the customer simply leaves the store before taking the time to focus in on Lowe’s search bar. If they did and typed in chain saw, then those products would quickly populate.
On the other hand, it’s easy to pick out problems with other sites, so let’s take a look at an ecommerce site which has organized it’s information in a way that the customer can easily process and navigate through it in order to buy what they want. Below is World Soccer Shop’s homepage, which is streamlined for business.
One eye tracking article reports that website visitors tend to stray from the left navigation column in the same way as the horizontal lines pull away from the tall vertical that is the backbone of the letter “F.” With this in mind, notice that all the categories listed at World Soccer Shop is organized nice and neatly down the left nav. column. If a customer wants “balls,” just go down to the column labeled “balls.” There is no ambiguity or confusion about this process.
There are little to no distracting signals on this page, but just in case, there’s also an advanced search bar located at the top of the left column for easy use (not hidden among the creases of the homepage banners or stuffed into some other obscure place.
Along with ensuring that your website has a shopper friendly design, it’s also important to hew closely to good SEO practices. To learn more about how to improve your ecommerce SEO, we suggest reading “How to Keep Your Ecommerce Product Page SEO From Slithering Away.”
