Part of the E-Commerce User Experience Series

Customers often need to visit physical locations of companies to complete transactions. Your website should help them find the most convenient location that offers the services they need. This report features locators that find several types of businesses including: stores, offices, dealers and ATMs.

This 143-page report contains 56 design recommendations based on our usability research. Discussions and 113 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings. This report also includes quantitative data on participant’s success finding and using store locators.

Benefits

• Checklist of 56 guidelines for directing customers to the right locations
• Techniques for presenting location information to reduce customer calls and getting people in your stores
• Common usability mistakes to avoid when designing locator features

Topics

• Deciding between interactive locator tool or location list
• Google Search to find store locations
• Task flow to directions and maps
• Mapping and directions integration
• Entering an address to find a location
• Locator links: From web search, the homepage, and within the site
• Search page layout
• Location listing page layout and details
• Printing and emailing directions

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)

Research Method

The information in this report is based on two rounds of usability testing with 25 people using 20 location finder designs. The number of locations represented by each website ranged from a few hundred to several thousand.