Listing products on rows with multiple pagination

Question

I had have an idea to display products in multiple rows that each of them can have pagination to see more related products, and I will love to discuss about this solution.

The results presented on the listings are supossed to be shown as recommendations of possible styles, as they come from an stylist professional. Each possible style could have multiple products related, so I thought would be better to display this by rows with pagination itself so user can see there are multiple recommended styles. This rows are scrollable, but placing everything on a traditional structure of simple rows with 3-4 products, It won't to be possible to realize that there are more recommended products by style until user scrolls down to see more.

It was my solution a good or a bad idea? Someone told me is difficult for users to understand the possibilities, but I think is even easier than traditional listings, and it works great for tablets and smartphones as well...

I will appreciate any thought on this. Thanks!

Answer 1

I've done some quick research about the solution you've designed.

In particular:

• Amazon app uses horizontal scrolling panels to show a selection of products (19 "Related to items you've viewed" products and 21 "Inspired by your shopping trends" products):

_{(source: mzstatic.com)}

• Ebay app for Android uses an horizontal scrolling toolbar (7 items in total) to refine the search results:

One thing I've noticed is that eBay and Amazon use the two horizontal elements, but not together.

eBay, for instance, combines an horizontal scrolling toolbar with a vertical list of products.

At this point the questions I'd ask myself are:

• How many products are there for each style? In your example we can see 3 slides with 3 products each: will their quantity stay the same in the future, as the business expands? What happens if they grow in number (let's say you have 50 products)?
• How many styles are there? Only the 3 we see in the example or more (e.g,: 5? 10? 30?)

Depending on the answers to these questions (and many other factors, including: the IA of the website, who are your users, etc.) you may want to consider some alternative options.

OPTION A

In case you have just 2/3 styles and very few products for each style.

OPTION B

In case you have more styles and many products for each style

Extra questions/considerations:

• I have no idea of the user journeys and the general IA of the website, so in these examples I haven't included top level navigation (?) and/or links to other pages/sections. They will need to be there.
• The wireframes are for landscape orientation, in portrait you will need to reconsider spaces etc. according to the amount of information you need to show.
• How does the "Refine" filter work? What happens when the users clicks on the image of a product? Is this app for e-commerce or catalog view only?
• We can assume earrings, necklaces and pendants are quite standard and self-explanatory categories in most countries: is there any particular reason why you want to use icons for them?

Hope it will help :)

Answer 2

My feeling would be that it's a bad idea. Someone once told me a carousel is only good at one thing, and that's ensuring your visitors don't see anything but the first slide.

If you'd prefer to keep this, do away with the 3 'pips' which i believe aren't yet widely understood, and try a "see more" link, possibly with an arrow to indicate more hidden off screen. Or this could expand the section downwards to reveal more, depending on how many more items there are.

Alternatively, turn the first click on this page into one where the user selects the style they want from a grid of options. Each option could show a few examples of the product, but only once you've clicked one to you see a full page of all the available products in that style, and a back link.

Let me know if that doesn't make sense and i'll see if i can sketch it :-)