Hierarchical organization of information helps users to find the products or services your site is offering. Although search is becoming more popular, some sites need a category-organization scheme. How to make this organization depends on your audience and the language that audience uses.

Ciao.co.uk, a well-know in Europe shopping comparison site, has been invested a lot of time creating categories for it’s huge catalog of products. Ciao uses very descriptive category titles and makes them even more meaningful adding some subcategories as a description.

Target has not a very clear organization and it’s not helping customers to guess where the desired products are. If you want some kitchen furniture, would you look for it in the Furniture category or in the Kitchen + Dining one? Instead of give users an idea of what these categories are containing, Target is placing advertisement under the category name (e.g. “Free shipping”). This is the “New This Week” menu:

The whole home page is messy as they have too many menus, on the top, left, center… and they contradict each other. In this menu Home and Home Décor are at the same level:

On the other side, in this central menu, Home Décor is under the Home category. Sorry, I don’t think this is representing the users’ mental model.

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.