Oct 1, 2024
2 minute read
Imagine entering a retail store divided into 10 rooms, each filled with 50 clothing items. You begin in Room 1, exploring every product. As you finish, a closed door marked “Enter Room 2” halts your progress. You open it and proceed to room 2, only to encounter another closed door before room 3, and the pattern continues. Each room ends with a decision at a door, and by the time you reach room 10, you’re weary from the constant interruptions. Now, picture the same store but with all doors wide open. You can effortlessly glide from one room to the next, freely exploring without thought.
This analogy illustrates how ecommerce websites create roadblocks every time shoppers reach the end of a page. The open-door approach is the analog equivalent of a modern-day infinite scroll pagination popularized by social media platforms:
TikTok and Instagram are masterclasses in attention-holding user experiences.
A key aspect of how social media apps hold our attention is the way they construct a user experience around endless content. You never have to stop to think about what to view next; when one piece of content is viewed, the next one is already cued up for you.
Social media platforms know that a well-designed user experience doesn't need a back button because each page seamlessly provides a path forward to the next experience.
This mindset of eliminating dead ends can be transferred to the design of an ecommerce store.
On most Shopify stores, the item details page displays a row of similar items. This is good because it allows shoppers to always move forward. But some designs take this further.
In the early internet, you could only load so many products on a page, so when you reached the bottom, you were presented with an option to load the next 50 products via page 2. This concept of paging through products has persisted to this day. However, there is a reason Instagram and TikTok have eliminated the manual paging of new content. Every time a shopper faces the choice to visit page 2, they must decide whether to continue engaging or leave. This disruption in the user experience diminishes their attention.
I mean, how often do people visit page two of Google?!
Modern Shopify stores are starting to adopt the same infinite scroll pagination found on social media platforms. When the shopper reaches the end of the page, the next products begin to load, creating a seamless experience.
The always-in-motion style of design is an admirable goal but difficult to maintain. Some ecommerce features, such as filters, are specifically designed to reduce the number of results, often leading to more dead ends.
Blue
Green
Yellow
Orange
Red
Purple
Pink
Black
Gray
White
Color filters, for example, typically consist of a list of ten color names: Red, Orange, Yellow, etc. Selecting one of these attributes sometimes filters out 90% of the results. Once shoppers quickly view the red products, they are left with an empty page, wondering what to do next. This is the drawback of specific filters. While there’s value in including a highly precise filter such as “light blue,” it disrupts the shopping flow to surface such few results on a page.
What if I told you there’s a way to achieve the precision of a “light blue” filter without filtering any products out at all?
No more dead ends, just one beautiful infinite scroll.
There’s one company out to solve this problem for good, and they have the Shopify plugin to prove it. Hoppn Labs has patented a new way to search products by color called Infinite Color Search. Hoppn’s algorithm is fundamentally different from traditional color filters.
Rather than filtering out colors, it sorts them.
Filter
Sort
For instance, when you search for a specific shade of white, you see the most accurate matches at the top. But as you scroll through the entire catalog, you will eventually reach black.
This sorting method allows shoppers to seamlessly venture into other harmonious colors. When a shopper searches green, the next results are yellow and blue. It organically shows the next best thing, reranking the entire catalog for every search.
On top of this, Hoppn has patented a new user experience that moves beyond a boring list of color names. Using Hoppn’s color wheel, shoppers can select any nuanced color and instantly see results.
Hoppn aims to create a search and discovery experience that makes shopping effortless and fun. This starts with the mentality of eliminating dead ends and keeping shoppers in motion!
So, we encourage you to look at your website in a new light. Ask yourself where customers are getting stuck and how you can use that open space on your website to further their journey. And if you’re looking to try new innovations in the process, install Hoppn’s “Infinite Color Search” Shopify plugin. Hoppn’s AI system saves you time by recognizing the color values from your images, so you don’t have to apply color tags ever again. The installation is no-code and gets up and running within minutes!
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