Findability Find of the Week: 3Balls.com

Welcome to FindWAtt’s Findability Find of the Week, a new blog series where we highlight websites or tools that are making great strides in findability.

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the Faceted Navigation of 3Balls.com. 3Balls has done an excellent job managing the attributes of their products and presenting them in a way that is useful to the customer. The navigation of this site has many advantages over other sites we’ve seen, but for today we’re going to focus on two main points that have a huge impact on findability.

1) Thorough Attributes – Unlike sites that only allow filtering by Brand, Price, and/or Size, 3Balls has anywhere between four and twelve attributes per product category. I’m no golf expert (I can’t guarantee that they aren’t missing any relevant attributes!) but the available filters make it very easy to narrow down the results to a manageable number and find just the right product.

Example from 3Balls.com—the Wedges category contains 12 filters!

2) Well-Populated Attribute Values – One problem often found on sites with faceted navigation is insufficient population of attributes. A product filter that allows the customer to choose between “A” and “B” doesn’t function well when some “A” products are missing the attribute value “A”.

This is not a problem with 3Balls, as all products appear to have the appropriate attributes. For example, within 734 Wedges, the “By Hand” attribute shows 137 for Left Hand and 597 for Right Hand. These numbers correctly add up to the total number of 734 products, indicating that each product has been populated with either “Left Hand” or “Right Hand”.

Together, these two features make it easy for a customer to quickly and easily find exactly the product he is looking for, and to feel more confident in making a purchase because he can be certain that he has seen everything that meets his criteria. A shopping experience like this is almost enough to make me want to take up golf!

Do you have a website or tool you think should be highlighted on FindWAtt’s Friday Find of the Week? Leave a comment below or send a tweet to @WikidKandice to submit your contribution!