Baymard institute advises you to “Avoid ‘Quick View’ Overlays”
While researching the impact of ‘Quick Shop’ on your store, I stumbled upon an article from Baymard Institute explaining the usability problems with that design pattern and what could be done about it.
About Baymard Institute: they conduct a lot of large-scale usability research and testing on e-commerce sites. Some of their findings are published for free and some of them are behind a paywall. Because of the scale of testing their articles are full of gold nuggets for your Shopify store.
Since I’ve already covered the speed and behavior data issues with ‘Quick Shop’, it makes sense to look at the issue from the visitors’ side.
What do your visitors think about the ‘Quick Shop’ feature? How do they use it?
The article uses the name ‘Quick View’ for this feature, also known as ‘Quick Shop’ in most Shopify themes. I adhere to that naming for consistency with the article.
My summary
The article opens with the popularity of the ‘Quick View’ overlay—at the time of writing (Sep 1 2015) 48% of US e-commerce websites had that feature. I wondered was this popularity because of blindly copying what others are doing? I’ve seen this in many of my clients “Our competitors are doing it, so we should do it too!”. Blindly copying, without testing is bad for your store.
As the article later suggest, implementing ‘Quick View’ improved conversion rates only if the collection pages weren’t designed to the actual needs of your visitors. And still, they remind us time after time, that this is a symptom fix, not treatment of the core problem.
The 3 major takeaways:
- From users’ point of view, ‘Quick View’ adds an intermediary layer between the product listing and the product page. A step that may very well introduce unnecessary friction.
- Baymard Institute’s conclusions are that this additional layer is a symptom treatment of a bad product list design. You should make sure your product listings/collection pages display relevant primary information which makes it easy for people to visually compare products on the listing page.
- Most of the test subjects found the ‘Quick View’ functionality confusing and pointless. Weird enough, most of them thought the ‘Quick View’ was the actual product page. For the rest, getting to the product page was problematic because of accidental opening of the ‘Quick View’ overlay. This added unnecessary frustration to the shopping experience.
If you’ve read this far, I believe you’ll benefit from my “No Code Shopify Speed Optimization” guide! It is a quick read that’ll help you get the right mindset towards your Shopify store customizations.
Read the full Baymard Institute’s article here “Product List Usability: Avoid ‘Quick View’ Overlays”