By Howard Gray
It's become conventional wisdom that on-line shoppers crave information. With the opportunity to make web pages just scroll longer, or add another page for more details, there's a risk of information-overload. It's not that you don't want to educate shoppers about every detail of a product. The question is how to go about it effectively: give product details when it's useful, hold them back before it's necessary. Kind of like a human sales person, right?
There's a good web design technique for presenting long specifications lists and important related information articles dealing with such topics as, "How to select a widget?" But before we jump into the how, let's consider the why:
Humans are capable of swallowing small chunks of information at a time. Because of this fact of "cognitive" capacity, we've become accustomed to dealing with large amounts of information in bits and pieces. Our books are broken down into chapters, our magazines into sections, our news programs into segments. It's said humans can only process up to 8 items in one instant. That's why our phone numbers are 7 digits long. Anything much longer than that can't be quickly remembered. The same goes for processing images and information.
How does this affect our use of the web? Sometimes web designers forget these limitations. E-commerce websites struggle with balancing "lots of information" with "how much information is too much?" Fortunately, there's a common sales technique called "progressive disclosure" and it can help educate your shoppers about a product bit by bit.
Progressive Disclosure and Tabs:
This is a process whereby information is revealed in stages. Though tabbed navigational structure claims its basis in the real world of cabinet filing, its success on the web comes from progressive disclosure. In an effort to address a number of concerns, both from a user standpoint and from a programming standpoint, we've developed a flexible system that is controllable by the site owner in the naming of the tabs and the functionality of the tabs. To paraphrase web usability expert Jakob Neilson: websites have grown so complex that progressive disclosure is a good idea for many information-rich sites.
Tabbing is progressive disclosure. It offers benefits for novice and advanced web users. For novices, tabs on a product page prioritizes their attention. For advanced users, it saves them time, avoiding having to scan past a large list of features they may not use. "Higher-level pages contain higher-level concepts and simplified descriptions, and lower-level pages fill in the details for those users who want to know everything," Nielsen wrote.
Advantage 1 - Cognitive Overload is diminished. Returning to the capacity of humans to absorb information in chunks, information held in tabs allows the user to navigate through the product features, specifications, reviews, or whatever you choose, at their own leisure. This way they can prioritize what they want to know, then make the selection without having to struggle and scroll down a long page of text, lists or find the "How to" related articles clear down at the bottom of the page. They can skip what they don't want to be bothered with.
Advantage 2 - Tabbing information into bite-sized chunks cleans up the product page, moving everything higher up on the page. Essentially, tabs create a clean, tight, organized single screen page that is not overwhelming with text, lists, links and the like. Think of it this way: books eventually replaced the scroll, and now you know why. History repeats itself on the web. With tabbing, you're "organizing" your book by chapters. Tabbing holds all the pages critical information "above the fold" in a manner that can be immediately seen, adjusted to, and selectively clicked on.
In Summary, a tabbed product page:
- Allows you to control how much information is revealed to the shopper at first glance.
- Allows "progressive disclosure," a preferred sales technique advantageous for detail-rich products.
- Reduces "cognitive overload." Of vital importance for site owners with technical pages with lots of information. You allow them to control how they want to digest it in logical, informative "chunks" of information. They can skip something if they don't want to read or scan it.
- Allows the site owner to control how different types of information is presented to the visitor both in visibility and in order of importance.
E-business Coach clients who power their e-commerce websites with our Total Blue System e-commerce software can take advantage of a new tabbed product detail page template. It's being released as part of our next System Update in the coming weeks.
By Howard Gray, E-business Coach
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