Search, Filters, and Finding the Right Chair in Three Clicks

Most people who want to find office furniture online do not want to browse. They want a black mesh chair with a headrest under £250, and they want the page that shows exactly that and nothing else. This post is about how search and filtering work on deskwell.co.uk, and the thinking behind the categories, which is the part that took longest.

Categories named for how people shop

Suppliers file furniture by range and by code. Nobody shops that way. So our 48 categories are named for what a person would say out loud: mesh office chairs, height adjustable standing desks, staff lockers. Two of them, office chairs and office desks, hold nothing directly. They exist so the menu makes sense, and every listing lives one level down.

The test for every category name was whether someone would say it to a colleague across a desk. Computer and task chairs passed. Operator seating solutions did not.

The three clicks

1. Pick the category. Mesh office chairs, say. The page arrives with every listing already on it and the price on each card, ex VAT, the same price for everyone.

2. Tick the filters. On a chair category the panel offers usage rating, price, lumbar support, headrest, colour, back height and arms. Tick black, tick headrest, tick a price band, and the grid narrows as you go.

3. Open the listing. Full specification table, a delivery date in working days, and a 3D model on the listings that have one, which is a good many of them.

Three clicks is the promise for the common case. The rare case is often quicker, because we built pages for it.

Pages for the searches people actually make

A filtered grid is a good result, but it has an untidy address and search engines do not care for it. So the combinations people search for most have pages of their own with a clean address: black mesh office chairs, office desks under £250, standing desks with memory presets, 160cm office desks. There are more than 160 of them. Each one is a live cut of the catalogue with the filters already ticked, so a new listing that fits appears on the page the day it goes live, and one we drop disappears the same day.

Collections are the other layer, and they answer a different question. Categories answer what a thing is. Collections answer what it is for.

Search, and what it does not do

The search box at the top of every page searches the site. Type mesh chair and you get a results page for mesh chair. There is no paid placement and no sponsored row, because there is nobody paying us for one.

Sorting on a category page is the same idea. Recommended, best selling, name, newest, and price both ways. Recommended is the order we set, and it means the listing we think suits most people in that category. It is not a slot anyone can buy.

The performance bit

A category page is sent from the server with the products already in it, so the grid is on screen before any script has run. I care about this more than is reasonable. A page that takes a second to show anything is a page people leave, and a filter that feels slow is a filter people stop using, and a filter people stop using is a customer ringing to ask a question the page already answered.

None of this is clever. It is a menu named in plain English, a filter panel that narrows a grid, and a set of pages for the phrases people type. The clever version has pop-ups, a countdown, and a chair that is somehow always the last one in stock. We tried the other way.

Start at the shop and try it: category, a few ticks, listing. If it takes more than three clicks to reach the chair you had in mind, tell us which filter was missing. That is the sort of thing we fix.