Boots : Helping customers find their way around

Noteworthy extensions of a breadcrumb trail improve visitors' sense of location.

The Site

Boots is the UK’s leading high-street chemist selling pharmaceuticals, health and beauty products and travel and photographic services. Its website is effectively the digital branch of its shop network with the home page currently acting as a display window for the retailer’s two big January themes: the seasonal sales and dieting/fitness.

When browsers pick a product offer or go to one of the store’s 12 ‘departments’ two locator bars are added below the two universal navigation bars. These are labelled respectively Where You Were, a link back to the home page or the last section visited; and Where You Are, the reference for the current section. The Where You Are bar fills with a ‘breadcrumbs’ trail as you explore pages within the current section. You can return to any part of the journey by clicking on the reference in the locator bar.

The Takeaway

Clear signage and the ability to retrace your steps are as important online as they are to shoppers in a physical store. To the retailer they are even more important in the constant challenge to reduce ‘drop out’ rates and increase the volume of online sales.

While breadcrumbs trails are used on many sites, Boots’ locator bars are noteworthy on two counts: first, their plain English labelling of the bars (Where You Were and Where You Are) which is helpful to inexperienced web users. Second, the Where You Were option allows users to switch between sections, a useful feature in a department store environment.

A common problem with breadcrumbs is that a page that is used in two different sections cannot have two different trails – with the result that in one of the sections it will be wrong. This does not appear to be a difficulty here: Boots’ products are unlikely to appear in more than one category.

The January sales period has a major bearing on retailers’ annual turnover. With online shopping continuing to grow Boots shows how, with a little thought, fundamental site features can be enhanced to make for an easier and more comfortable retail experience.

First published on 08 January, 2004