January 5, 2005

Link Usability in Shopping Search

Jakob Nielsen has a throught-provoking article on Reviving Advanced Hypertext. Under the section about Integrated Search and Browsing, he talks about the importance of annotating each navigation label with the number of search hits in the area it points to.

For example, if a user was searching at Henry Ford's Old-Time Car Site, and they could not decide between black and blue, but were cetain about not wanting orange or yellow, these link annotations would be useful:

Black (1000)
Blue (10)

...because the color black could allow for considerably more feature refinement. So, which shopping engines are giving their users the gift of foresight, and which ones are making them rely on hindsight?

Link Annotation at Shopping Search Engines:

Shopping.com	YES
NexTag	YES (all except for the price range)
Shopzilla	YES (all except for the price range)
Yahoo Shopping	YES (price range is not applicable)
MSN Shopping	YES (although they often have too few attributes for meaningful refinement)
PriceGrabber	NO

Not too shabby.

Are shopping search engines among the more usable sites on the Web?

Link Usability in Shopping Search
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on January 5, 2005 at 4:02 PM
Archived at Shopping Search Usability