Improve Your Ecommerce User Experience
Talking UX might sound daunting, or not your cup of tea. But it’s something you need to really focus on as a business, to improve sales and customer satisfaction.
If a user is having a problem, its our problem.
– Steve jobs
I agree not one of the most well known quotes, but a hard hitting truth when thinking about an online Store or Website which has to engage users and lead them on a journey to an end goal. Online shops spend millions on Google adwords, Facebook ads, into product research and into design. All missing the one key value, UX! It’s a massive problem. It not only affects your customers, your business, your profits and you. If you’re not optimising your ecommerce UX yet, know that your competitors are
What is UX?
User Experience or UX is the experience a customer has when visiting your eCommerce platform, it could be anything from simply browsing categories, performing a search or checking out. Usually a good User Experience ( UX ) can be measured on key aspects of the users visit to the site, finding the product they want, adding that product to the checkout and finally checking out with ease. The end goal is to make the whole process as easy, carefree and enjoyable as possible. While keeping the user engaged and wanting to come back.
User Experience doesn’t always start at design. Digging deeper into an awesome UX can result in lots of things going on behind the scenes. Is the site mobile friendly? Can the user navigate quickly and easily around the site? Does the site load quick? Is checkout process smooth and uncluttered?
You could keep listing these off forever, as there are so many elements to a eCommerce that might impact the user in a negative way and the design of the sit is just one small part of this.
With over 500,000 Shopify merchants, 235,000 Magento Commerce Stores and 2,241,106 Woocommerce sites, users have the option to go anywhere they see fit and if they get a better user experience elsewhere, you bet they’ll loyalty will be short lived.
Don’t underestimate how willing shoppers are to go elsewhere if your UX is subpar. 57% of shoppers already abandon carts to comparison shop, regardless of the quality of your UX.
Quick tips to enhance your UX!
Function over From.
It sounds cliche, but having a functioning fast website with great user experience is always better than a slower interacting site, Just because you want that video on the home page, doesn’t mean that it will result in higher sales. Below is a short list of items that might be impacting User Experiences.
1. Automatic Sliders – banners that play through automatically not allowing user to interact with them.
2.Videos loading – Video slows page speed down and distracts from the user journey.
Disorientating Navigation
Site navigations need to be clear and easy to use. If you’re bombarding the client with multiple level navigation structure you might distract them from their end goal.
Content
Write your content before you create a design for that page. Writing content isn’t always easy but being able to write your page content before you make a page is always best. – If you want a good UX, you’re going to have to let copy lead design. When writing ecommerce copy, always focus on the customer. That means conducting copy research ahead of time to understand your audience, how they experience your site, how they value your products, how exactly they describe your products, etc.
Mobile Experience
Just because you have good UX on desktop doesn’t mean that your mobile UX is going to be great. Mobile is a totally different demon and as such you need to treat it that way. A few key points to follow:
- Make it feel native to the device, don’t try to over complicate features that the user would expect to be native.
- Use the correct tool for the job, if the input requires a num pad keyboard offer this, don’t aways offer up the QWERTY keyboard.
- Disable autocorrect on checkout. Is there anything more frustrating than typing your address three times on your iPhone
- Allow visitors to search specifically within the category or subcategory they’re currently viewing.
- Speed is the most important of all. Mobile users can be on a variety of connections, understand this and cater for each user.
Spotting the problem.
Every eCommerce site is different, which means that every eCommerce site has different UX problems. Small or large!
Analytics are your best friend. Finding drop off locations in your eCommerce is critical. At what stage in their user journey do the customer exit the site. Are they making it past the home page? Is the product being adding to cart? Are they giving up on the cart page – or disappearing after seeing the shipping rates?
Don’t go in with the mindset of ‘Im going to improve the whole UX’ – use a process of elimination to first look into the process of people purchasing products, abandoning cart or increasing add to cart. Its like building a lego brick house, lots of small bricks eventually make one large house.
Because you’ll be taking small steps at first there will be some tools you’ll need to get you on your way, here is a short list:
1. Heatmaps – Look at scroll depth and click intent. Add links where people try to click, but can’t. If you see a sharp scroll color change, consider whether you have accidentally created a false bottom. Notice how far down people scroll and plan your messaging hierarchy appropriately. Try to encourage scrolling with visual cues.
2. Session replays – watch where people are navigating your site. Where are they dropping off?
3. User testing – Give people specific instructions (e.g. find a watch under $89 and add it to your cart) and watch as they try to follow those instructions, narrating their thoughts out loud.
A list of tools you can use:
Its all mobile first.
Users now are shopping more and more on their mobiles. Its time to step up and make sure your eCommerce is mobile friendly. User Friendly. Optimised for Speed and ready for the mobile experience.
Get in touch.
aware. are a digital agency specialising in Magento web development, with a team of Magento certified developers. If you’d like any further advice on enhancing the UX or UI of your current site, please feel free to get in touch with us any time.