Filter Users v. Table Scanners

Initial interaction data² tells us that not all g.com customers use the filter pane (previously called LHN, or left-hand navigation)—we call these customers table scanners. They tend to just scroll through the pages and tables until they find what they need.

Some customers use only the filter until they whittle down the selection to just a few SKUs. They will start at the top of a filter and make choices for most of the specs as they just scroll through the filter pane.

Most of us building the g.com experience likely fall under the ‘Power User’ designation, meaning we use a mix of both filters and browsing to find the right product very quickly once we’re at a leaf category page. It’s natural since we work within ecommerce and are building and interacting with the ecommerce experience daily.³

It’s important to acknowledge and understand that not everyone interacts with our website the same way. We need to build a presentation that supports all customer-interaction types as best as possible.

Planning Your Presentation Design to Support All Customers

How do we support filter-users, table-only customers, and the power user with one online presentation? By being thoughtful about the information design for each presentation.

There are often upwards of 40 attributes in the PIM (Product Information Management) system for main products. We certainly can’t fit 40 attributes into a table and filter, nor would the customer want us to. One of the decisions merchandising strategy teams have to make early on is which pieces of data are:

• Absolutely necessary for the customer to have in order to purchase a product

• Not necessarily critical to purchase, but expected

• Only relevant to the purchase by experts

² Grainger’s 2020 interaction data says that only of internal search visits had some sort of manual filter engagement.

³ We do expect to see the number of browse-only users decrease over time as technology use becomes more prevalent and expected amongst the population in general.

• Only relevant to a very select group of customers or purchase agents

These buckets establish the groundwork for where the information will be presented on g.com:

• Absolutely necessary for the customer to have in order to purchase a product (Table + Filter Attributes)

• Not necessarily needed, but expected before purchase (Table + Filter Attributes)

• Only relevant to the purchase of experts (Filter-Only Attributes)

• Only relevant to a very select group of customers or purchase agents (PDP-Only Attributes)

As you can see below, everything that is planned for a table should also be presented in the filter, preferable in a matching order of importance, to match the customer’s decision process. We’ll go more into this matching order in the Filters section.

Tables Design + Fundamentals

Basic Table Design

Tables are the last step of the decision process for many of our customers and should focus on helping them quickly and confidently make their final choice.

When beginning to build your table, you should have identified which attributes are:

• Absolutely necessary for the customer to have in order to purchase a product

• Not necessarily critical for purchase, but expected

The goal is to place all of those attributes in the table in a format that displays the decision-making process for the customer. The most decision-driving attribute in the first column, the second decision-driving attribute in the second column, etc:

After identifying what information you want to present to the customer and where, the first Step is to plan the table design.

Related attributes should be kept together in the table as best as possible. That means that if Height is the real decision-driving attribute for a customer, but width and length are not. We would still want to keep Width and Length next to Height in the table. The reason being that customers expect to see those types of attributes (such as Min and Max Temp, and dimensions) together.

There are additional table features, such as Product Group L2-4 / Subheads, Roll-Ups, and Attribute Value Columns, that help us dial in the table experience beyond this basic table structure. We’ll discuss those features later in the Tables section.

Differentiation among the products

We need to ensure that there’s information in the table to differentiate each product from the others.

When two products have the same exact data displayed in the table with no differentiation besides potentially price, we call them Table Duplicates.⁴ From a customer perspective, we’re not giving them enough information to confidently make a choice between the two products.

When faced with table duplicates, the answer isn’t always to add more attributes to the table to help differentiate the products. Maybe the difference is something that’s not really relevant to the customer and doesn’t deserve to be elevated from the PDP to the table—in these scenarios, it might make sense to reassess whether we need both products in our assortment.