I happen to be a big believer in herbal remedies. And according to the numbers, lots of other people are, too. Herbal supplements sales reached $5.3 billion in the U.S. in 2011, and they’re projected to hit $15.5 billion by 2017. That’s huge! So I was browsing around online for natural herbal goodies when I came across Botanic Choice. Now while I like what this ecommerce site is aiming for, it can be challenging to navigate. I have a couple remedies of my own to suggest.
Let’s start by looking at the home page. With all these little boxes and messages, there’s a bit of an information overload. As a shopper, it’s a challenge to sift through all these messages to find what you’re looking for. I would suggest eliminating some of these boxes and simplifying the visual elements. It will make the messages that are featured stronger, and more targeted to the customer.
There is also a huge number of categories, and I would really recommend reducing this to make it more manageable. Look at how many options there are for shoppers to read through! With this amount of categories, it would be faster for a customer to use the search function instead…
When you do go to a category page, there are a lot of results to scroll through. Add to that the fact that the product images of bottles all look pretty similar, and it’s hard to visually differentiate between items. It all starts to look the same!
Botanic Choice is doing fine in the functionality department, but I think this site could benefit from an organizational overhaul. The busy message boxes on the home page and the long list of categories can get confusing, and potentially overwhelming for shoppers. By consolidating the information and the messaging, and streamlining the visual appeal, the usability of this ecommerce site could be greatly improved for the customer.
2 Comments
Surprised you didn’t mention faceted taxonomy. They really really really (really?) need it. You or I could probably give them good pointers on that.
Their category tree is a conflation of several facets in 1 canonical tree, which is one of the give-aways that faceted search is needed. Ranganathan was right. Library of Congress is wrong. Compare their tree to Vitacost’s or Swanson’s. They keep it flatter + facets.
BUT the biggest concern of mine is that only the _left_ side is really navigation. The top menu is mostly wasted unless they can really nail it with their promos. It should try to nail customer needs in a mega-menu like Vitacost. That’s why I have no idea what to do more than anything else.
Leave it to you to bring up the need for faceted search, haha!
Sometimes there’s just not enough room to cover everything, but you definitely make some good points here. Lots of potential for improvement in navigation, that’s for sure.