How to Design a Great Product Finder

Product finders have become a popular tool for e-commerce businesses in recent years. A well-designed product finder can help your customers navigate your website more intuitively, leading to higher conversions and improved customer loyalty. But how do you design a great product finder, and what are the best practices? Let's dive in and find out.

Start Small 🤏

Creating a personalized and highly detailed finder for your website takes time. To avoid being overwhelmed, start creating and testing a finder for one category at a time. This way, you can refine your product finder before scaling it across your entire website.

Hierarchy of Questions

When designing your product finder, focus only on asking the essential questions. Make sure to arrange the questions in a logical hierarchy, with the most important ones asked first. You'll also need to include follow-up questions tailored to the customer's previous responses.

Avoid Sliders

Since 70%-80% of the traffic to e-commerce websites comes from mobile devices, mobile-first design has become an industry priority. Sliders are one of those elements that look cool but are not that intuitive for mobile users. Instead, opt for buttons with numbered intervals to provide a better user experience.

Show Products Along the Way

Some product finders require multiple questions to provide accurate recommendations. However, the more questions you ask, the higher the risk of customers abandoning the guide midway. To keep your customers engaged, display product recommendations along the way - allowing them to click on a product at any point they feel they've answered enough questions.

Attributes vs. Needs

Before building your product finder, you should determine what approach you want to take: attribute-centric or need-centric.

An attribute-centric approach is similar to traditional website filters, where the questions center around the product's attributes, such as color, size, and material.

A need-centric approach, on the other hand, involves designing the questions around the customer's use case or need, such as What's your skin type? or What's your preferred level of support in a running shoe?. This approach focuses more on the customer's experience and less on the product's features.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to designing a product finder, and what approach style you should choose depends on factors like your target audience, website design, and the products you sell.

In some cases, it might be beneficial to combine both styles, using the attribute-centric approach for some products and the need-centric for others.

Tailor the guide based on skills.

When building a product finder, it's important to consider the skill level of your target audience. Experienced customers may prefer an attribute-centric guide allowing them to quickly filter products based on specific features they already know they want, such as size or capacity. In contrast, beginners may need more guidance to determine which attributes are relevant to them. Failing to cater to their needs may lead beginners to search for information on a competitor's website instead of yours.

One way to address this problem is to create different product finders depending on how experienced the customers are. There are a few ways to figure out their skill level. One way is to ask them if they are beginner or advanced and alter the following questions accordingly.

Another, more discrete way is to ask if they already know what attributes they are looking for, or if they would like your recommendation. If they need help, they are probably beginners.

Another approach is to design the questions in a way that caters to both groups of customers.

Track the performance 📊

When analyzing your guide's performance, there are three basic metrics you should have a look at. These metrics are all connected, so understanding how they affect each other is vital.

1. Started Guides

This metric reveals how many people have clicked on your guide after seeing it. It relies on factors like the guide's placement, its initial message, and the overarching theme.

2. Completed Guides

This metric tracks how many individuals, out of those who initiated the guide, went far enough to get a product recommendation.

3. Click to Products

This metric measures the percentage of users who, after being given a product recommendation, click on a specific product for further exploration.

By looking at these metrics, you can see how well your guide performs and uncover ways to enhance it.

This, in turn, bolsters user engagement, boosts conversions and ensures your guide effectively steers users toward finding the ideal products.

Wrapping up

You know what they say - Rome wasn't built in a day. And even though you could technically create a product finder in only a matter of minutes, we highly suggest taking these steps beforehand. That way, you'll lay a solid foundation to create a truly great product finder. Trust us; it will be worth the effort.

Now - if you'd rather have a pro (hint, hint 😏) help you create the best product finder ever, we're happy to help. At Ebbot, we're experts in customer experience and creating interactive customer journeys with tons of experience setting up product finders.

Feel free to reach out for a free demo or consultation.

Remember, a great product finder can make all the difference in delighting your customers and boosting your business. So, whether you're flying solo or teaming up with us, we wish you the best of luck in building a kickass product finder that leaves your customers wowed.