When laying out a modern eCommerce custom design, our experienced designers take their cues from an unexpected place: the foraging strategies of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. In 1999, researchers Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card, working at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, developed Information Foraging Theory. They proposed that web-user behavior is not so different from the strategies our ancestors used when hunting for food. Our brains are tuned to our intentions: perception skews toward information related to our goals and filters out everything that doesn't. A visitor on your store is, in this sense, foraging for the product they already want — using the same selective attention an ancestor used to find the berries that wouldn't poison them.
Think about walking into a crowded bar to meet a friend who is already there. You know your friend is tall, wearing glasses, with dark hair. As you scan the room, you are unconsciously discounting everyone who doesn't match and locking onto everyone who does. That process of rapid, intention-driven selection is information foraging, and it is exactly what happens in the first few seconds on a product page or homepage. The brain is not reading the page; it is hunting it.
Information Scent: The Concept That Should Drive Your Layout
Pirolli and Card's most actionable idea for eCommerce is information scent: the strength of the cues that tell a visitor they are on the right path toward their goal. When the scent is strong — clear labels, an obvious next step, a visible relationship between where the user is and where they want to be — people press forward confidently. When the scent is weak, they hesitate, backtrack, and eventually leave. Most "the site just doesn't convert" problems are, underneath, weak-information-scent problems. The page is asking the foraging brain to expend effort with no clear payoff in sight, so the brain does what it evolved to do and abandons the patch in favor of an easier one — usually a competitor's.
This reframes a huge category of conversion problems. A high bounce rate on category pages is rarely an aesthetics problem; it is usually the foraging brain failing to detect a path forward. A cart abandoned at the shipping step is often the scent going cold because cost suddenly appeared where the brain expected progress. Diagnosing in scent terms tends to point at the real fix faster than arguing about colors.
Designing for Strong Information Scent
It is our goal, as eCommerce designers, to give every store a strong information scent regardless of industry. In practice that comes down to a handful of disciplined choices:
- Honest, descriptive labels. Navigation and link text should describe the destination in the visitor's own words, not internal jargon or clever brand language. "Men's Trail Running Shoes" beats "Gear Up" every time, because the foraging brain matches against the words it was already thinking.
- Visible next step. Every page should make the single most likely next action obvious without scrolling — add to cart on a product page, the strongest products on a category page, the highest-intent categories on the homepage.
- Predictable consistency. When the same action looks and behaves the same way everywhere, the foraging brain stops spending energy re-learning the interface and spends it shopping instead. Novelty for its own sake is a tax on attention.
- Progress and orientation. Breadcrumbs, clear filtering state, and a transparent checkout that shows how many steps remain all keep the scent from going cold mid-journey.
- Cut the noise. Every element that doesn't help the visitor reach their goal competes for the same limited attention and weakens the scent of the elements that do. Restraint is a conversion tactic.
Two Layout Archetypes: Product-Heavy vs. Experience-Heavy
There are two broad categories of eCommerce custom design, and information scent is applied differently in each:
- Product-heavy design suits catalogs where the visitor usually knows roughly what they want — auto parts, supplements, office supplies. Here the scent is carried by fast, accurate search, robust filtering, and dense-but-scannable category pages. The brain wants to narrow a large set quickly; the design's job is to remove friction from that narrowing, not to slow it down with storytelling.
- Experience-heavy design suits brands where the purchase is driven by aspiration, story, or trust — fashion, design objects, premium food. Here the scent is carried by imagery, editorial framing, and a guided path that builds desire before asking for the sale. The brain is being persuaded, not just filtered, so the layout slows down at the right moments instead of optimizing purely for speed.
Most real stores are a blend, and knowing which mode each page should operate in is a core part of a thoughtful custom eCommerce design engagement. The homepage and collection pages might lean experience-heavy to build the brand, while the product and checkout pages lean product-heavy to remove every gram of friction from the close. A common, expensive mistake is applying experience-heavy treatment to a checkout — large imagery and editorial flourishes where the brain just wants a fast, reassuring path to done.
Turning the Theory Into a Review You Can Run
You can audit your own store through this lens without specialized tools. Pick your three highest-traffic landing pages. For each, ask: within three seconds, is the single most likely next action unmistakable? Do the labels match the words a customer would have been thinking when they arrived? Is there anything on the page that competes for attention without advancing the goal? Then walk a full purchase on a phone and note every moment you had to stop and think — each of those is a point where the scent weakened. That short exercise typically surfaces more revenue opportunity than a redesign brief written from opinion.
Editorial note: this post originally ended with an embedded PDF download form (a legacy Podio lead-capture widget) in place of a conclusion. That non-functional form has been removed and replaced with the substantive layout guidance above so the article stands on its own.
The practical lesson from Information Foraging Theory is simple to state and hard to execute: design every page so the visitor's foraging brain always knows it is getting warmer. If your store is converting below where it should, a structured design review focused on information scent — not just aesthetics — is often where the fastest gains hide. The design team at 1Digital® Agency builds and rebuilds storefronts around exactly this principle.