Product Design
In an era of digital experiences, it is real hard to pinpoint a general rule for designing a good product. Apart from all the necessary requirements
Ecommerce UX
In the ecommerce world, it’s a great challenge to meet the ever-changing customer expectations. Now, customers want enhanced levels of speed, efficiency, and accuracy whenever they visit your stores. Ecommerce businesses have understood this change in customer behavior, and are looking to make online shopping more fun and enjoyable. Today, customers are goal-oriented and look for instant gratification so businesses need to try many things before they could succeed in the current market.
Everyone has the same technologies, but it’s the experience you deliver to your customers that matters the most. The competition to establish oneself and do well in a digital ecosystem is enormous. You just cannot let go of any opportunity to showcase your products and services. Your website or app is the first source of interaction with you and your customer. It’s your online identity, and you need to safeguard it to ensure customers feel the same way about your products and services like you do. Hence, it is important that you create a unique design for your website.
UX has finally become a major talking point in the ecommerce business. As businesses understand the many benefits it brings, UX design has become much more relevant to deliver a quick and seamless experience to customers to maximize their productivity online. Let’s see how you can optimize your ecommerce UX to bring in more happy and satisfied customers.
The basics have to be done right. There is now way you can take the functionality of your website lightly. No matter how many new features you add, you have to make sure that everything works as it is meant to be. It is easy to get carried away by new design trends that aim to bring a cutting-edge approach to make your website look more innovative and creative. Parallax scrolling, automatic image sliders, ghost buttons and video backgrounds are popular among ecommerce designers. But if they don’t perform well for some reason, it can lead to unnecessary distraction, slow load times, and poor user experience.
Some of the great websites are built to be functional, and not very visually attractive. The main concern for designers is to help the business highlight their products and services in the best way possible. Good designers follow a simple principle – Removing parts of design that are not essential. They clearly prioritize function above all else to support the visitor in reaching his or her goal.
Many ecommerce providers start with the design first, and then fit in the content based on the theme they have selected. This is a wrong practice because you are not giving due importance to the user. Before you finalize how your website should look and what you content should be, it is important to consider the requirements of the user. Why they are buying you product, what are their goals, and what are the things they don’t want to see in their products.
An ecommerce copy needs a good research to get these points right. Your ecommerce copy articulates your unique value proposition to the customers. A concise and effective ecommerce copy is a powerful weapon to convince the customer about the many benefits of buying the product. Your design should enhance the content and not the other way round.
Craft an intuitive navigation: When customers visit your site, they are looking at a variety of options, possibly many different products under categories and sub categories. It is easy to get lost! This is where a good UX helps the customer to easily find their favorite products without much effort and interruption. Ensuring your ecommerce discoverability is intuitive is important to facilitate user-friendly navigation. Customers don’t like complex website navigation where they need to click and scroll until they find the desired product. There are few things you can do to prevent such an issue:
UX research is the method to understand how users think, behave and feel through various well tested investigation approaches and bring solutions to the product users.
Use familiar words when labeling. Don’t make people think.
Use the prototypical ecommerce design. Visitors will expect their cart to be in the top right corner, for example. Keep things familiar.
Always include the internal search option for those who know exactly what they want.
If you have a wide selection of products, you’ll have to use mega menus. Make categories and subcategories clickable. Plus, those category landing pages will be good for SEO.
Keep the navigation consistent. Standardize the process and design.
Highlight the link to the page the visitor is currently on, wherever possible.
Customers want to shop on their own terms, whether its desktop or mobile, it doesn’t make a difference to them. You need to understand that design for mobile is a completely different challenge. Customers are looking for something very different from your store on mobile than they do on desktop. Offering the desktop UX on mobile is not the solution, you need to find a consistent medium to improve the mobile UX. Some mobile UX strategies you need to consider are:
The mobile experience should feel natural to the user.
You should allow users the option to do a “Guest Checkout”
61% of all mobile users “sometimes” or “always” go to their desktop/laptop computer to complete their mobile orders. Make sure they can save their carts.
Allow visitors to search specifically within the category or subcategory they’re currently viewing.
Introduce new digital wallets to promote the easy use of mobile for ecommerce
Every innovation in design is a specialized task. Leave it to the experts to help you find better ways to engage with the user. In the modern environment, people have no time to waste on repetitive and unwanted tasks. The ecommerce website or mobile app you design should be able to make the best of new trends and help you to sell your products to a wider audience. With more awareness and education, it is possible to solve your ecommerce UX problems.
