Exploring e-commerce navigation patterns
Last weekend, I set out to explore few unique navigation patterns and other ideas for ecommerce on mobile. I wanted to share a few of them in this article. Please note that these concepts just came out of a fun, self-brainstorming session and some of them may not be usable or even feasible. :)
#1 Photo Navigation
A big problem I have seen in ecommerce is navigation. People do not know which category a particular product belongs to. For instance, it’s really hard for a lay man to distinguish between the categories highlighted in the below image if he wants to just buy some storage item.
Pictures speak a thousand words.
So, I was exploring a navigation pattern where there is a picture of items with hotspots to go to a particular category as shown below.
This can probably be extended to fashion commerce which also has the aforementioned problem to a certain extent.
#2 Conversational Interface
Getting rid of all the clutter and non sense in a typical e-commerce app, I was wondering what if there is a conversational interface for m-commerce, much like how shopping is done offline.
#3 Shopping for Eye Glasses
One main reason of people not buying few things such as t-shirts, spectacles, shoes etc. online is because they are not sure how these things actually look on them. By implementing face recognition technology and detecting eyes of the user from the front camera of the phone, we can let the user see how a particular spectacle frame looks on him / her. The user can swipe and see the frames changing live on his face. This can reduce the uncertainty involved in an online purchase.
Users may also share a picture of them with different frames, with their friends and get their opinions… something on the lines of Flipkart’s Ping.
#4 Measure and Shop!
One big reason I don’t buy shoes or shirts online is because I am never sure of my size. To make matters worse, the actual sizes are not the same across brands. There are always little differences which make people uncomfortable in buying them online as no one is obviously interested in returns / re-orders etc. It is also a pain for e-commerce companies.
With technologies such as Intel Realsense coming in, it’s not too far before our phones can accurately measure sizes of objects. If that can be done, the user can just point his phone to his shoe, it measures the size of the foot and shows corresponding shoes. The user can swipe and see different shoes in augmented reality and buy the one he likes the most!
Author: Raviteja Govindaraju, www.raviteja.in
