Filtering UI: A Horizontal Toolbar Can Outperform the Traditional Sidebar (Christian Holst)

At e-commerce sites the filtering interface has historically consisted of a left-hand vertical sidebar. However, over the last couple of years a new filtering and sorting interface has become increasingly popular: a horizontal toolbar which combine both filters and the sort tool. In fact our Product Lists & Filtering benchmark reveal that of 50 top US e-commerce sites 24% have ditched the traditional filtering sidebar in favor of a combined horizontal filtering and sorting tool (similar to the one in the image above). (baymard.com)