What’s Your Spin on Carousel Navigation?
I’m often asked which are my favorite ecommerce sites. Endless.com is one of my favorites because of its innovative usability features including its “carousel” navigation on product pages - which exposes more product from the same category to the customer without requiring a return to the category page. I liken it to walking around a shoe store with one style in your hand as you look for close alternatives.
So during the Merchandising Trends in 2008 session, I was surprised to hear experts Doug Mack, VP and General Manager of Hosted & Consumer Solutions at Adobe, and consultant Sally McKenzie both agree that they didn’t like the carousel navigation feature on Endless:
This goes to show that different people (both in the industry and customers) can have different opinions! This was just one of the examples discussed in the session. If you missed it, here’s your chance to weigh in on what you think about Endless’ carousel.
A few reasons cited by the experts (loosely paraphrased) were that the carousel is clunky to use, and there is a problem with adjacency - the selection offered may not be what the customer wants to see. They also prefer to see more content on the page rather than so many product choices. (Please note that the screen shot shows the zoom effect of rolling over a point on the product image, which covers up the product description — there is one hiding underneath.)
Regarding adjacency - this is a very good point. Relevance of any cross-sell is key to effective merchandising. Because Endless is an Amazon property, there is likely a sophisticated personalization engine that determines the product selection that could offer more relevant results. There are also a number of filtering tools available, like price sliders, color refinement, brands and sizes that help the customer hone in on specific product attributes that will improve adjacency.
The carousel’s placement at the top might not be optimal, perhaps showing the selection below the product information is less imposing on the customer, but still helpful. (Something that should be split tested).
It also takes a long time to view the conveyor belt of products when it might be faster just to jump back to the category page and view far more thumbnails at once. American Eagle Outfitters may do a better job with its category exposure. When viewing any product page, you can hover over View All [Category] and browse the category without clicking back:
An idea for Endless might be to allow a “Quick Look” that provides product price, description and other information when hovering over products in the carousel.
As retailers and as online shoppers, what do you think of carousel navigation? How does it detract from the customer experience? How does it help?
Hey Linda,
I work for otto.de, one of Germanys bigger ecommerce sites. We’ve ben tinkering around with carousel like navigation elements. We mostly used them a promotion instruments using the carousel as a way of showing styles that fit into the promotion theme in a nicer designed way than the usual product list.
However for a carousel to really be a benefit I think you have to integrate presonalization data and link the carousel navigation to a specific communication (e.g. “more similar shoes”) to let the user know what the carousel is about.
Another perspective on the carousel may be that you don’t need the tool if you have a good working product list which already cannibalizes a product detail view where the carousel would be located
Best regards,
Denis
I think the carousel has potential. It seems to cater to people’s desire to easily browse a lot of product. In the case of Endless.com, they’re focusing on a visual and price to do that.
It seems like the key is relevancy. Are the carousel options relevant to what I’d to browse? Am I browsing based on a particular style, brand, or price? The better they’re able to target, the better the carousel will be.
When you mentioned that the experts preferred more content on the page (as opposed to more product choices), what did they mean by that?
@Denis and Jason K.,
I agree, personalization makes this more effective, and certainly Amazon has the technology to do that well. Also, the user can winnow down the filtered navigation options, even with the price slider, color and width to show only acceptable styles.
The experts didn’t elaborate on what kind of content or, at least I didn’t catch it as I was making my notes. Perhaps they meant they’d rather see content than graphic clutter, or that content was more usable/valuable to conversion.