Case of the missing product

While perusing drum cymbals on the Drumshop website, I went to filter down to 7” cymbals only to find that there are none. So why bother with a filter option for 7” cymbals? Not only are there no cymbals, but the webpage is essentially blank and doesn’t even have options to rectify this search term. Now I manually have to click ‘back’ in my browser.

Key Heuristic to remember…

“Software should be forthcoming” - Alan Cooper

Solution…

No 7” Zildjian cymbals? No problem. Let’s remove the 7” filter option at this point.

I would work with developers to update the design, so that rather than always showing all filters - the system will only make available to users the relevant filters that are appropriate for each step, as they reduce their search down. These filters that are not relevant should simply be greyed out and unresponsive - a convention that has been applied to countless other e-commerce sites, intuitively and efficiently implying that these filters are not available.