Product option choice considered a soft navigation

[yoavweiss]

crbug/1371927 outlines a few examples where the heuristic's result is arguably a false positive: product options where the user clicks to e.g. change the item's color result in a URL change and a DOM modification, and hence are considered a soft navigation.

More research is needed to see if this can be avoided.

[yoavweiss]

After looking at the examples again, I'm less confident that it's a false positive:

• In many cases, changing an option reloads the hero image, showing the new product option (sometimes on a different model)
• It triggers many changes on the page such as: different thumbnails, price changes, different suggested items, etc

So it seems like it may be reasonable to consider this a soft navigation to a similar (yet different) product page.

^^ @anniesullie

[tunetheweb]

I agree. To me there's a user interaction, a state change, a UI change, and a URL change. That to me seems like it should be a soft nav.

The only concern is if there is not a navigation history. On the Walmart example, for example, clicking back does not take me to the previous option selection.

So, rather than a URL update, should we insist on a URL pushState and exclude replaceState? Perhaps that should be a separate issue though...

[anniesullie]

So it seems like it may be reasonable to consider this a soft navigation to a similar (yet different) product page

Would love to collect a list of issues like this where it's a bit subjective whether it's a navigation and hear working group feedback!

[yoavweiss]

The reliance on contentful paints should potentially help here.
If we see a bunch of cases where the change is "too small" to be considered a navigation, we could add a limit based on the %age of viewport changed. However, experiments with that approach did not prove particularly useful.