Five best practices for improving UX in ecommerce
Whether your company understands the fundamentals of User Experience (UX) design or not, more than likely everyone has stumbled upon a UX design website that is friendly and one that is not. Good UX design simply makes the entire customer experience and process simple and easy to navigate.
A great example of changing UX design for the best is with LinkedIn’s introduction of “nudging” users to finish their profiles by completing the status bar above their header. This status bar led to a 55 percent increase in completed profiles because LinkedIn users wanted to be at 100 percent or as close as possible to 100 percent.
This triggers our psychological sense, deep-rooted at times, that tells us “we need to complete this now.” What does this have anything to do with ecommerce and UX design, everything.
As website designers at a UX agency Denver, you aren’t just designing a beautiful website, you should be designing functional, fast, easy and simple user experience websites.
In the ecommerce industry, a proper UX design website is the difference between checkout success forms and chart abandonment rates.
As BigCommerce says, “A bad user experience is like walking into a very messy and disorganized retail store.”
The emotions in play right there, the negative or positive feelings, are the same ones that happen online with consumers. Check out pages not working- waste of time and frustrating. Can’t find the right product- go somewhere else.
From a leading UX agency Denver, here are five of the best practices for UX design in ecommerce websites.
1. When is motivation high?
In the entire ecommerce experience, when is the customer’s motivation at the highest? During this pandemic, online grocery shopping and pickups increased by 15 percent because consumers were told to stay home or simply needed to stay home.
Another example isGrubhub or DoorDash. There is a running joke that it is better to pay the $10 delivery fee than go to the restaurant. And when many closed their doors for indoor dining, this was the lifeline for months.
Did we all pay an extra $10 for it to simply be dropped off to us so we could finish our Netflix binge? Yes, and it was worth it. It kept us safe, comfortable and was the driving force behind ordering out because we couldn’t show up at any old restaurant.
The motivation behind this is simple- you can’t leave so order food, you don’t want to cook, you have no food or it is just so convenient.
Easier it was to order said food and get it while it was still warm continued the motivation behind paying a bit more to enjoy food from our favorite restaurants.
2. Simplicity at its best
The navigation on a successfully UX designed website needs to be simple, and that is what it really boils down to. 94 percent of consumers say they want an easy to navigate website and has consistently been one of the top features that consumers continue to provide feedback on.
This is because it provides a seamless experience that allows for the consumers to move from one space to another on the website without having to jump through loops and bounds to find the product or information that they have been searching for.
3. How is the checkout process?
This is a pretty basic practice for an ecommerce website because this is where the cash flow comes from. Whether they come from another channel and end up at the checkout, it doesn’t matter. What really matters is the final “success” at the end of the URL.
Before they get to checkout, is it simple for them to add items to their carts? This is all part of the beginning stages of the process. If so, this is the first basic. Once the product is in the cart, make sure it keeps them on the same page with confirmation that it worked.
A frustrating experience is not getting confirmation, or once you add it to cart, it navigates you to that page or doesn’t take you back to the same one.
Also, don’t get to the end of the experience and not let the consumer continue without signing up for an account. This is either a frustrating experience or a simple one for that consumer.
If one is not tied to your brand yet, it could be a bit annoying and push them away.
4. Include SEO
Our UX agency Denver always brings SEO into the mix somewhere along the lines because it affects everything at some point. This is because the search engines, who will rank your products, want good content as much as they want great design.
Even if an ecommerce site has a beautifully designed UX website, it won’t rank without SEO, and if it has SEO but is an older site, it won’t rank as great as other sites with both.
5. Clearly displayed products
Where are the products placed on your website? This is probably the most important basic in all of this because if they can’t find the product to begin with, there is no cart abandonment rate and they will find motivation from another site.
Make sure to have the products with high-resolution images, clearly and properly categorized into the right areas, optimized for SEO and provide that seamless checkout experience.
There you have it, five basics for improving UX design on your ecommerce site. For more help getting the process started, contact our UX design agency!