Custom Product Configurator – Responsive Interface
Our Custom Product Configurator now has a Responsive Interface!
A custom product configurator needs to have controls that are easy for the end user to define exactly what flavor of your product they desire. Options that are not possible at a certain size, material, or whatever the criteria may be, should not be shown until they are really an option. An interface must be developed that is both easy to use and does not allow mistakes to occur by having ineligible options presented to the customer.
As part of the process of developing your configurator, we will extract that information from you in order to create a compelling interface that responds to customer inputs to hide, show, or alter the available options based on real-world product parameters. The goal is to always show the fewest options possible at any given time while always having the full range of options readily available. 4 to 6 options at a time is ideal — any more and you risk what social psychologists call choice overload. This is why Amazon only lists six items in their “customers who bought this also bought section.” Social Triggers has more on that subject, but when you think about your own experiences online, you likely click away from a form that pops up where there are zillions of fields, or a page with a huge amount of options for a certain product all presented at once.
Give the interface a try below. It starts with just one option — to select a cabinet type. Once a cabinet type is selected, all of the other valid controls become visible. The width option has values based on the cabinet type. Change the cabinet type and the available width options may or may not change as well, and it may include a “Custom” option. If “Custom” is available and chosen, a new field for entering a custom width becomes available, etc., etc. Giver a try…
In case you missed it, some of the text for the forms have tooltips — just hover your cursor over them for instruction, but for the most part things should be self explanatory. So far, we have kept the interface style relatively simple, but in future posts we will switch to slightly more styled drop-down boxes, add some animation (like the credit card form) to show a bit more of what’s available.
There are quite a few things we will be adding in coming posts that are already listed in our last article. The main one I want to do is the online chat/help feature as well as some image based catalogs. Stay tuned for the future posts by subscribing over on the right, or if you want to get going with a custom product configurator on your own website before the competition does, contact us today to get the ball rolling!
