I curse you, 1000 items long SERP lists*
The web as we know it is almost 15 years old and despite ajax, html5 and enormous innovation in user experience, till this very day when I look for a hotel in Paris or shop for a new digital camera I'm blatantly presented with search results looking somewhat like these:
Paris hotels,
digital cameras.
Click 'search' on kelkoo,
shopping.com or any comparison site and you should consider yourself lucky if you get a list containing less than a thousand unique products. All "neatly" presented in a cramped table broken up into tens of pages bubbling with meta data. Misguided visual presentation of products insides tables and rows, in front of a potential customer, could in fact be an offspring of a database structure itself, where records pile on top of each other, which sort of makes it natural to present them to users in a corresponding format.
(To be on a fair side. It's not that there was absolutely no innovation in presenting search results to consumers. Picture views, matrix views, on-the-fly ajax filtering or the recent - endless scrolling, have pushed the envelope a little. Still, we're miles away from desired intuitiveness of search results).
If we look ahead, 2 things are for certain:
- With long tail theory, cut-throat SEO competition and convenient xml 3rd party inventory distribution, online store owners will keep ascending their inventory hot-air balloons into an internet stratosphere.
- Puzzled customers will keep searching for their needles in the haystack just like they did before, because they don't know any better.
Or will they? What if someone breaks this pattern finally and starts presenting products in a more human compatible format.
Rather then having customers to sort through our "haystacks", use elaborate filters, click back and forth between search results and the product page, why don't we finally come up with a more intuitive way of comparing products.
Enter Pavan charts**
What's really important to a consumer is the relationship between quality and price, also known as value for money.
These two variables are crucial in making a purchasing decision. Price is easy, one says, but what about quality? How to objectively determine quality if it's so vague, subjective and based on conflicting priorities. Guess what: quality is easy too.
Quality of a particular product (I take hotel as an example) is based on:
- objective factors (ie: star rating, distance from downtown, amenities)
- subjective factors (in this case: guest review)
If we apply specific weights to all of the above and merge them into a composite variable called Quality, it's safe to assume we're in the ball-park.
Plotting these two variables: price and quality for any given product on a chart, serves the user well with a visual and intuitive map of value for money. Juxtaposing hundreds of products, each being - one tiny dot, takes the user a fraction of a second to figure out what she should take a better look at.
Great benefit of such presentation of search results is it's visual character. In each usability study I've done, it was apparent that users disregard text & numbers in favor of images and charts. Pavan charts draw users attention to the core of value for money and enable her to not think about meta data.
Truth is, the Idea isn't particularly novel. You get these types of charts on every second page of all MBA books. What's novel to me though, is a use of these charts in online stores, comparison sites or meta search engines.
I personally haven't encountered anything like Pavan charts in any e-commernce product, so please If you get to see one, don't miss to let me know.
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*SERP: search engine result pages. In case of any online store: a long list of products you'll get after you click on a category name.
** Idea inspired by a colleague of mine: Pavan Lulla, hence I dubbed them Pavan charts.
