New product display for Kelkoo

By writing my last post about the new design of PriceGrabber’s search result pages, I realized that I haven’t detailed the new product display we launched on Kelkoo in July. So let’s do it :)

The previous product display was introduced in October’07 along with the full redesign of the Kelkoo site (See an example below of this product display). At this time, it was a welcomed improvement over the previous old site (to be honest, we couldn’t stand the old site anymore :) ); but months after months, gathering feedbacks and looking at the site every day, we found that this product display could be improved.

After various reviews / discussions / prioritization sessions, we identified the main drivers for this ’08 redesign:

• Get rid of the price column to allow more space for the main column that contains the description of the product, even if we acknowledge this price column is interesting for users and also to implement some legal rules in some countries (i.e: display ecotax in France)
• Revise the current hierarchy of information. I.e: for shippable goods, add delivery time / availability in a more proeminent way in the product display, as those are some valuable information to decide where to shop.
• Build a product display that can be used all across the site, and can be customized for the various types of products available on Kelkoo.

The latter was really an important topic. On Kelkoo, we display shopping offers (electronics, fashion…) but also travel offers (holidays, flight tickets, hotels, car hire), financial products (credit cards, saving accounts, loans), real estate goods… All those kinds of products can be displayed in the same search result page for very broad queries; still, each of those kinds of products have different and specific attributes that need to be highlighted for customer choice.

Overall, it was a nice challenge in terms of of user experience / interaction design. One of the key decisions was to introduce a “more details” panel to remove non-critical information from the main display. This extended view also gives space to add extra data that couldn’t be displayed before. You can find below a few examples of this new product display.

On “shopping” products, the emphasis is put on the price + delivery cost, just above the “GO” button to the merchant website.

On “holidays” products, the rating of the hotel and the condition (price per person, double room…) are visible in the default view. The extended view adds more details like the available start dates.

On “Credit cards” products, the % APR is displayed instead of the price for shopping offers ; and the extended view describes various advantages offered by the card.