E-Commerce: (Somewhat) Recent Design Practices

Recently, Scott McCall, a Newfangled Project Manager, and I were discussing the best location for local navigation on a website. The various options examined during the course of the conversation included placing the local navigation on the left side of the page, on the right side of the page, or at the top of the page beneath the global navigation. The last option would list links horizontally, rather than vertically.

Usability testing would have been helpful. However, in the context of our conversation, we did not have time to conduct such a test. I did happen to stumble upon a site called Web Design Practices. This site conducted a survey of 75 e-commerce sites and analyzed their navigation systems. Lest the reader dismiss their research, let me point out that household names such as Amazon.com, REI, Gap, and Circuit City comprised just some of the leading web retailers in the study.1

Web Design Practices examines topics such as Global Navigation, Breadcrumb Navigation, and Faceted Classification. They then describe how other leading e-commerce companies design these navigation items on their sites. I commend this site for your consideration and study. Here are some things to keep in mind when using the research results:

The research is an empirical study of website design practice. It is not intended to show which types of navigation are more usable. It only shows which types of navigation e-commerce sites use, and how they use it.
Heidi P. Adkisson, the researcher, breaks the results down by percentage. For example, we learn from her study that 89% of the sites placed their global navigation horizontally at the top of the page, whereas only 11% placed the global navigation vertically on the left side of the page.
75 sites comprise the study. The study is not a comprehensive test of all sites, but it does include some of the most popular ones.
The research only considers e-commerce sites. The results may be very different for a different type of site.
The study is from October, 2003. Much may have changed in the last 4 years.

Nevertheless, a study like this may provide guidance when considering how to design different navigation structures on your website, especially if you are constructing an e-commerce site. The study is not directly a usability test, but you should keep Jakob Nielsens Law of the Web User Experience in mind: users spend most of their time on other websites.2 Even though you might have a good reason for going against common practice, remember that convention increases usability. Customers and web users will appreciate navigation they recognize and with which they are familiar. As Steve Krug notes, Innovate when you know you have a better idea (and everyone you show it to says Wow!), but take advantage of conventions when you dont.3

1 You can find the full list here.
2 See Mistake #8 in his article, Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design.
3 Steve Krug, Dont Make Me Think, 2d ed. (Berkeley: New Riders, 2006), 36. The binding on the second edition of this book is pretty bad, though. Id recommend just buying the first edition. Not enough new material was added after to the second edition to justify buying a book whose pages will soon fall out!