A balanced product list design provides users with a better overview of the products available and helps them more accurately determine which products to investigate further — essentially whether a list item’s product page is worth opening or if it should be skipped. This ensures that the scarce time users are on your site is spent on actually evaluating products they may want, rather than excessively navigating back-and-forth in a product list (also known as “pogo-sticking”).

Filtering is about empowering the user to take a large generic product list and narrow it down to a small manageable selection of products that is uniquely tailored to their needs and interests. It is about taking a product list with potentially thousands of items and weeding out all products that are irrelevant to the user until just a few handfuls of highly relevant items are left. Yet our extensive UX performance benchmarking shows that 34% have a poor filtering implementation, making it almost impossible for users to narrow down a generic list to include only (or mostly) suitable products.

Learn More: Besides exploring the 1046 “Product List: Category” page design examples below, you may also want to read our related article on “3 Pitfalls to Avoid if Implementing “Quick Views””, “5 Essential Filter Types Users Need on Product Listing Pages (57% Don’t Offer All 5)”, and “Display “Applied Filters” in an Overview (32% Don’t)”.

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