Examples of improving something’s FINDABILITY
Because you can’t USE IT if you can’t FIND IT.
I created this conceptual set as just one of many component features that could enhance an internal platform’s value for IT’s Business partners. It supported a movement towards not only identifying and enhancing internal talent, but also making IT professionals’ skills and specialities more transparent to others in the organization.
Such a framework could give voices to less assertive individuals and help everyone become more aware of the ideal internal folks for project efforts.
There’s no better win than finding your superhero.
Search engine functionality has vastly increased over time, with Google and Amazon often setting the bar in the standards other organizations seek to imitate for their users. Sometimes it’s a matter of finding the combination of standards that works with your user base and that which is feasible to develop and implement internally.
Here is one exploration of Type-Ahead functionality.
Search smarter.
It should be no surprise with an electrical parts manufacturer to have as a common user base many individuals on the cutting edge of technology, with advanced and specialized training, often identifying within the engineering fields.
Individuals daily using very large, widescreen monitors. Folks interested in maximizing their view and minimizing their searching time.
Many of the site features I conceptualized, prototyped and helped to come to life often featured making filtering and product findability more intuitive.
Most of the individuals with whom we user-tested these concepts spent much of their day trying to find the right parts.
Know your audience.
Very rarely will a design ever go from its current state to a fully robust and glorious future. Expect iterations. Show the stages.
Consider all the things. What if there are no product images? How many results should it contain in a normal situation? How many lines/characters? How does it truncate? How does it show in another language?
Think iterative.
Nobody likes super sensitive flyout menus, especially ones that lead to two or more levels of flyouts. Be kind to those who’ve consumed caffeine at some point during their day. Don’t settle on navigation that hides the majority of options with easter egg mentality.
This animated visual shows not only an on-brand facelift, but one that also removed much of the visual noise left over from a dated SharePoint theme.
And, not to be overlooked, the star of the show — implementation of mega menus (and the retirement of overly sensitive multi-level flyouts).
Coffee consumption resumed.
Remove frustration from navigation.
When an organization’s product portfolio contains 400,000+ unique products, it’s essential to give users as many ways as realistically possible to find the product they seek.
Pictured is one of the website pages I created to share knowledge on a common function: finding and comparing products.
Complete with a self-narrated video.
Self service should be discoverable.
Prototypes with placeholder text are great in theory, but lousy in communicating whether or not a concept could actually work.
I always dig to expose examples of real content, complete with less ideal search results containing dated (or no) visuals, including the juicy bits that might be hidden.
Best to know what reality looks like long before you put it in place and have to devise a heroic fix or accept a heavily-compromised implementation.
Know thy content.
Digital design concepts are only truly complete when all interaction nuances are accounted for and detailed to the extent where no one on the project team has to guess what’s going on.
It’s in the interaction details where a site goes from being informative to being instrumental in predicting what the user will look for next.
Make interaction intuitive.
Visualized here is a Solution Builder feature.
The top picture shows hand-drawn sketches working through concepts — where it would live, layout options, interactions, and behavior. My flow animation captures much of what I’d sketched (sketch shown below) and shows finding a compatible product to a currently inspected product (Part # 5-928999-1) on its detail page.
All interactions prototyped are predictive, exploring the actions an engineer is likely to take once a set of parts is found, researched, and chosen.
Predict what your users will do next.
A bit of context on the B2B and B2C products:
It is well known that users of this worldwide electronics manufacturing organization are usually not looking for a singular electronic part, but an assembly of multiple electronic parts that work together. So, once a user finds part X, the site’s relational database intelligence structure [service] can deduce they’re likely building Thing A, Thing B, or Thing C. And [the service] can further predict that they’re going to need part Y and part Z to complete the electronic circuitry of that assembly. Often, those complementary products are mating parts, but sometimes they are housings, hand tools to work with the part, etc. The term I use is Compatible Products.
