Often online stores must balance trying to provide customers with a unique shopping experience against site navigation that is easy to understand and use.
On the one hand, site navigation should never baffle visitors. A shopper should be able to quickly and easily find products and make a purchase. But providing intuitive site navigation that is unique or interactive is a good way to engage customers, encourage those customers to tell others about your site, and, frankly, make shopping online a bit more fun.
In this showcase article, I have identified eight ecommerce sites that use simple but different navigation to help customers find products and have fun.
Shicon
The Shicon website features a yellow horizontal scroll bar on its home page to show shoppers about a dozen interesting product-centric photos. Each photo is a link too.
Zoomii Books
Zoomii Books uses site navigation similar to what you might find on Google or Bing maps. Book covers are arranged on shelves and shoppers can pan and zoom around the shelves to find the books they want.
The Decoder Ring
At The Decoder Ring website you can purchase posters, fine art prints, and other products that are displayed in blocks. Rather than having categories or brands to shop by, there are simply blocks of loosely related products and no separate product detail pages to speak of. Paging through sections of the site, which simulates browsing, is a hot trend in site design, so expect to see more of it on ecommerce sites in the coming year.
MANKINDdog
The MANKINDdog site features what would be a simple content slider except for the use of image blurring. The content slider, which is also circular, meaning it does not slide through several products to get back to the beginning of an unordered list, becomes the central navigation on the site.
Feel The Power
Feel The Power uses color, motion, and interactivity to create an excellent example of alternative site navigation that is at once intuitive and product focused. In fact, the use of color to categorize products makes the site easier to navigate then many sites I've seen that sell similar products. Freedom Interactive Design created the interface.
Loworks Store
The Loworks Store is an example of combining sounds with otherwise standard navigation to create a standout shopping experience.
PodShop
At the PodShop home page, a shopper is greeted by icon-based navigation that persists throughout the shopping experience.
Dirty Coast
The Dirty Coast website offers previous and next shirt buttons on its product detail pages, so potential customers can page through the products.
