Findability Find of the Week: Color Family at Endless.com

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

This Friday’s Find of the Week is the color family filter on Endless.com.

Endless sells shoes, bags, and other accessories, and like most other online shoe retailers, they have the typical filters: Category, Brand, Size, Width, and Heel Height. Where Endless really shines, however, is in their Color Family filter.

Because there is such a wide variety of colors (especially in apparel), using it as a filter can present some challenges.  One common tactic is presenting all color names with no normalization. This leads to too many options requiring too much work on the part of the customer.

For example, here is the color filter from another online retailer who sells shoes. In order to view all blue shoes, the customer has to click Blue, Denim, Light Blue, Navy, and Turquoise! This means ten clicks to view all blue shoes (since the customer has to click to clear the selection each time in order to get back to this list.)

Endless has an elegant and intuitive solution to this problem: rather than displaying dozens of color names, they represent color with swatches, which the customer can then click on to see products in that color.

For example, clicking on the blue square returns the following products (and many more), despite the fact that the “official” colors for these products are Turquoise, Jetblue Quasar, Teal, Navy, and Onyx.

The solution Endless has implemented is well suited to customers’ needs. Color is a very visual attribute, and presenting a visual representation of color that doesn’t require reading an entire list is both intuitive and efficient. The word list of colors above contains only 50% more values than the swatch list from Endless, but takes far more time to process and allow the customer to reach a decision.

Which interface do you prefer? Have you seen this tactic used by other retailers? How could a similar idea be applied beyond just color?

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!