[thelist] asked to rebuild an eCommerce category/subcategory/product structure

[Hassan Schroeder]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 6:45 AM, Bob Meetin <bobm at dottedi.biz> wrote:

> The example: Sub-category ABC has 25 products.  Rather than display the
> 25 products in a dynamically generated table of 3 or 4 columns across
> and whatever number of rows needed, she wants me to use either one or
> two product scrollers which will probably show about 4 thumbnails
> horizontally with the scrolling mechanism.  Yes it will appear to look
> cleaner.
>
> Aside from the fact that this will take substantial time to create as
> this is not how the software delivers the category/subcategory/product
> tree, I would appreciate some usability feedback.

Personally I like to have the choice of seeing either a few larger
images or a larger scannable selection at one time. (Sometimes
tiny thumbnails are adequate, sometimes not.)

So a items-per-page choice, e.g. [ 4 | 12 | all ] would be nice.

Not that that's necessarily less work for you :-)

OTOH, horizontal "scrolling" of 25 items in chunks of 4 means the
user has to continually scroll back and forth to compare; I think you
would need to provide a "page" locator at least, identifying the group
currently in view, and letting the user jump directly to a given "page".

FWIW,
-- 
Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ hassan.schroeder at gmail.com
twitter: @hassan