"Solutions" as a primary navigation item.
I recently had a meeting with a prospective client, a software company looking to make some strategic changes to their site. They had previously organized their site by audience and were now looking to focus on their primary audience and bring their product content a level up. "We are thinking that we want the navigation to be "Products", "Solutions"...
What exactly is a "Solution"?
I have seen solutions as:
- product packages
- product/service packages
- hardware/software/service packages
- vertical-specific product packages
- vertical-specific case studies
- product listings for a particular audience
- product offerings for a particular business challenge
What do users think of "Solutions"
I had the opportunity a few years back to do a usability study for a large hardware/software/services company who also offered "solutions". In fact, the goal of the study was to see why a particular division's hardware/software/services offerings were failing to satisfy their users. Part of the problem? Yup, you guessed it... solutions.
We tested both engineers and business decision makers from large and small organizations and found that generally users don't know what to expect when they see the word "Solution" so most shied away from that area, opting to try repeatedly to find the information they sought in the Products area.
Because this division's products generally include at least two of the three types of offerings: hardware, software and services, the bulk of their content was hard to find or not well represented in the Hardware/Software dichotomy of the Products area. By and large, their content was under "Solutions." A few users never even found that division's mini-home page under the "Solutions" navigation choice. They instead concluded that the content did not exist.
Ironically, every search I tried to find out if anyone has studied the usability of 'solutions', resulted in usability firms touting their own usability solutions (what I would call 'services', but that is just me).
Other Strategies for handling 'Solutions'
I haven't had the opportunity to test some different "solution" strategies that I have seen:
- Not having a 'products' navigation item in addition to 'solutions' thereby forcing users to get to products via solutions -- sounds risky to me, but I don't know...
- Having a call-out to relevant solutions on product pages -- hard to do well and the owners of that content won't like how far it is 'buried' in the site, but again, I don't know...
What did my former client do? They didn't really change anything. They combined their 'business challenge' solutions and 'vertical-specific' solutions into one category, "Solutions" and put it first in the navigation, right before Products and Services.
My Recommendation for Solutions? - Avoid it altogether.
What would I recommend? Whenever possible, leave the vagueness of "Solutions" behind and call a spade a spade even if it means you will have slightly longer navigation as a result. Shorter labels are not better if they sacrifice clarity.
So:
- Call product packages, "Product Packages"
- Call product/service packages, "Product & Service Packages"
- Call vertical-specific product packages, "Products for your Industry"
- Call vertical-specific case studies, "Industry Case Studies"
- Call product listings for a particular audience, "Audience Products" like "Consumer Products" this may be an alternate way to browse products -- one way is Hardware/software if the user knows what they want, another would be "Products for: consumers, businesses, large enterprises" etc.
- Product offerings for a particular business challenge? Ok, this one is tougher... Give me your list of specific business challenges and a few days and I am sure I could come up with a few options for you, but you get the point...
I don't believe that the word "Solutions" holds the allure that marketing and product folks seem to think that it does. It also hasn't proven to be the effective 'solution' for things that are hard to categorize that some would hope, despite the fact that "everyone's doing it".
Post new comment