When's the last time you looked at the Findability of Products on Your Website?

The 3 key processes that determine whether your customers can find what they want

Have you ever been shopping in a grocery store, and one of the store employees politely asks, “Are you finding everything ok?” If you are like me and don’t know the layout of the store like the back of your hand, you take the opportunity to ask the clerk exactly where everything on your list is located. Otherwise you end up wandering up and down each aisle, looking at the shelves, hoping to find stuff. This is the basic concept behind findability: How easy is it to find what you are looking for? And in most grocery stores, I have found the findability to be very poor.

In his book “Ambient Findability” Peter Morville defines Findability, dictionary style:

find-a-bil-i-ty n

a. The quality of being locatable or navigable

b. The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate

c. The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval

On the web, and specifically for e-commerce sites, findability means how easy is it for a shopper to find the product they are looking for.

This is extremely well put, and I can’t say it more clearly. For e-retailers, having a website where the products are findable is critical to their ability to compete. If findability is poor, sales and customers are lost because…You Can’t Buy What You Can’t Find!

But how do you judge findability? There are three basic processes to be evaluated:

1. If you know what you want, can you find it? – This is called known-item-search, and appropriately, the search box is most often used. If I am looking for an 8 GB iPhone 3G, and I search using that exact phrase, do I get those results right away? Or are the first results something unexpected, like accessories for the phone? Or nothing at all?

2. If you have some idea of what you want, but do not know exactly, can you find it? –This is where findability is actually most difficult to achieve. You know you want a coffee maker, but which kind? Ideally you have some knowledge of coffee makers and which kind you prefer. But it may be you don’t have a clue. How well can you find the right coffee maker for your situation?

3. If you’re just browsing, will you easily discover something you want to buy? – In this situation, you are not focused on specific product type. But can you navigate through all the available choices? And to what extent can you refine your search.

This evaluation is far from academic. Findability has real business consequences. If you can find something easily, you have more time to decide whether to buy, and continue shopping for more. For the e-retailer and shopper alike, there is nothing worse than not being able to find the product they might buy. And worse, frustration in finding a product causes disillusion, preventing a transaction, and possibly losing a customer.

Will Evans, founder and Principal User Architect for Semantic Foundry, sums it up nicely, saying:

Increased findability leads to increased business results

• More people find what they’re looking for – faster – thus improving conversion rate
• Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Decreased customer service cost

Opportunities for targeted merchandising

• Up-selling based on selected facets (similar attributes might mean affinities in the customers mind
• Cross-selling based on selected facets
• Each facet selected is valuable customer data (these are attributes customers are saying they are interested in!)

Have you shopped on your own site lately? Try each of the 3 findability processes. Even with known-item search, we find that lots of sites have problems. If you start with only a one or two keyword search, are you presenting your customer with pages and pages of products with no way to filter other than brand and price? Are you forcing your customer to keep adding keywords to the search box before they can get down to a manageable number? Or worse, does your search end up with fewer results than customers would get if they navigated to the relevant subcategory (a common problem)?

This will give you a rough sense of your site’s findability. To start managing your site’s findability, use the Findability Evaluation Framework available in our Findability Review section to identify where you can get the biggest Findability boost with the least effort. Or sign up for a FREE Findability Review, and we’ll do the work for you.