Let Your Office Roam

DevBridge has recently launched a new website that sells office supplies, furniture and break room products called BisonOffice.com. We wanted to share with you the experiences and decisions that had to be made during the development of our own online store.

Our goal was and is to make this website well organized, easy to use and fast. By "Easy to use" we mean that the steps necessary to find products and complete a purchase are very intuitive and simple for the customer.

I would like to overview a couple of the challenges that we faced implementing the design and functionality of this website.

Site layout

Do we go liquid or fixed? We have chosen liquid, but limited its minimum and maximum width. Usually if the width is too narrow it cannot accommodate all the features that are present, if it’s too wide it becomes hard to scan and impacts readability. We also had to think if we wanted to show the products in a list or a grid. After some usability discussions we chose a grid and made it automatically adjust based on the browser width. This works well for products, but does not work that great for text. Long lines become hard to read and your eye loses focus while jumping from one line of text to the next. Therefore everywhere where we use a bigger block of text, we keep it narrowed down.

Product Search

Another area where we wanted to spend a lot of time was product search. Many commerce sites that have a large selection of products (we have 40,000+) often have poor search functionality that is more a burden than a blessing. Most common problems with search is that users often use different words or spelling in their search. It is big help for the customer to get suggestions of search terms based on what they are typing in the search box. Google does it, Amazon does it, and any other modern commerce site should do it.

Autosuggestion ensures that spelling will be correct and shows possible alternate queries for that keyword. It is also very important that pages load fast and search results are displayed almost immediately after user clicks search button. Study on page speed done by Google confirms that fewer searches are performed if there is a delay in page load time.

Things to come

Many things that customers would expect from the commerce site are already here: product search, product categories, filtering by brand, green product indicator, product specifications, shipment tracking notifications, order history and more. We have planned many improvements and innovations for the site and many of them you will see in the near future. One feature at a time, so stay tuned.