Top Menu : an Endangered Species?
Publié le 25 septembre 2008 par Simon É
While benchmarking top B2C e-commerce sites recently, I noticed that more and more online retailers are removing their top horizontal menus (browsing navigation) in favor of search-based navigation, like eBay did several years ago. But what is happening (or has to happen) behind the scenes for this change to take place? Is this approach well-suited for your business or industry?
In its recent redesign, Wal-Mart completely deleted its top navigation, that used to list all of the store’s departments and provide drop-down DHTML menus listing subcategories within each of the departments. Removing the menu helped spare precious vertical screen estate :
Before :
 
After :
When Wal-Mart began using Endeca’s search solutions a few years ago, one couldn’t guess that it was going to give the search tool the prime spot in its header, leaving its department-store-like navigation the second role. With its own A9 solutions and an ever-growing selection of departments, a similar redesigncould almost be anticipated for Amazon in late 2007 :
Patagonia and Marks & Spencer also bear a similar layout :
  
Here are my recommendations, should you consider a similar shift :
- Keep in mind that some users search and others browse. Even if you fashion a minimalistic iPod-esque navigation, that doesn’t mean cumbersome features aren’t useful to others. Maybe what you need is more menus to explore more dimensions of your products (what are the primary levers of your customers’ buying decisions?) You could also measure what proportion of your customers choose which navigation tools.
- Make sure your internal search tool is worth being shown up front, and that it behaves well in case no result can be shown. Think synonyms, misspelling, variations, plural, dashes and ponctuation, abbreviations, nicknames, familiar terms, mixed search, relevance, accuracy, page navigation, sorting and filtering… a lot of internal search tools can’t properly handle all that!
- As a basic SEO requirement, keep available real HTML links to all important categories and pages in the upper part of your homepage and navigation pages. The sites shown here all have an “All departments >” DHTML drop-down menu that lists most (if not all) of their catalog categories and sections. (I’ll say more about that in a future post.)
- Keep track of what is searched for in your internal search engine. Zappos does just that to provide its visitors with a list of popular searches (this season people search for Uggs a lot, for example) and a link to each of the popular result pages. But analyzing what comes through your search engine can also help you ensure that your site doesn’t have any dead ends, and that the naming and tagging of your products is appropriate (this is a prime example of where Website usability and Web analytics come together).
- Consider configuring result pages manually for very frequent and/or important searches (risk=probability*impact). That means, for example, showing the category page as a featured result when a visitor searches for a category name, before listing all products in that category. One could even have optimized internal landing pages (but there are probably higher priorities on most sites)!
Otherwise, you may want to stick with the very usable and time-tested solution of sharing space between a search tool and an horizontal menu that other important retailers, such as Target, use :
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Tags: A9, all sections menu, amazon, Endeca, site search, top menu, Wal-Mart, Web usability
