39% of people leave a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. 38% of people leave due to unattractive layouts. 44% of people leave if they can’t find contact info easily on your website.
What does this all mean? This means that User Experience (UX) is actually more important than the content you are putting on your website. No matter how much money, time or efforts you invest in your content, if you are not going to address giving users the best possible user experience, you won’t be maximizing the effectiveness of your e-commerce website.
Overlooking UX when crafting digital strategy for your business is a massive mistake. If your cart abandonment rate is abnormally high, it’s a clear indication that your users are not impressed and that something is coming up in their way to complete their purchase.
Great UX Boosts Conversions
Suppose you walk into a brick and mortar store. You see every item properly organized and placed that allows you to easily navigate to the items you are looking for. Every product is tagged with price so you know how much they cost. The store also has a good active customer support. Finally, you find the store’s checkout process straightforward. All this leaves you with no reason to quit and you end up converting. You are also most likely to visit here again due to the seamless experience you had last time. And this does not stop here. You will tell others about it.
According to Jeff Bezos, if you build a great user experience, people will market your business. They will tell others about it. And people tend to trust a business recommended by their friends. Word of mouth is very powerful.
The same goes for online businesses. Unless you make your visitors feel at ease at your store, give them trust and make their shopping journey pleasant, you are not going to reach your true business potential.
What Makes a Great User Experience?
So what are the elements of a great UX and how to ensure a seamless, logical, and enjoyable shopping experience on your e-store? Although every element on your store should be perfect to provide a good UX, the following are the 5 major elements that contribute heavily to a website’s UX. All the massively successful ecommerce sties have managed to capitalize on these elements.
1. Hierarchy & User Flow
Make sure you are planning the hierarchy of your project. Having a hierarchy planned before you start designing will give you a good foundation to start design. It will give you that clarity exactly where you need to start, what screens and pages you need to create. It’s going to promote a better user interface because you know what screen to take you where so you can work on designing how that’s going to happen.
Spend some time on the hierarchy of your store by sketching it on paper or marking it in a software such as Adobe XD. Getting the visual hierarchy laid out beforehand will save you a lot of changes later.
2. Simple Navigation
You might have planned a great hierarchy which promotes good user flow but if you have an inaccessible, cluttered or vague navigation, users won’t stick for long.
Make sure you have a good navigation. It needs to be simple, easy to use and easily accessible. Take a look at FMEextensions, an Ecommerce web design Dubai. The navigation is ultra simple, encompassing everything in just a few menu items allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for.
You must have been in the scenario where you select or click on something and then you are stuck and don’t know how to get back. So something as small as including a back or close icon can drastically improve a user experience.
Your navigation should allow people to easily find what they are looking for. To do that, you should logically place products under relevant categories and sub categories and give them self describing names. Make it a point to allow customers to reach their desired products in as few clicks as possible.
3. User Feedback
Adding little things into your design like loading on a button or a hover effect on the desktop version can really make the user experience a positive one because you are giving them information based on their actions. There is nothing worse when you are on a website and after clicking ‘Buy Now’ you is displayed nothing and you don’t know what to do next. This causes confusion and panic and lead to a negative user experience.
4. Simple & Fast Checkout Process
I know from a personal experience there can’t be anything more frustrating than losing a customer at the checkout step. Losing an interested customer at this step means there was nothing wrong with the product or price but something in the checkout stopped them from buying. Make sure you avoid the following things on the checkout to minimize your cart abandonment.
- Restricting customers to one payment method. 65% of customers expect a variety of payment options on the checkout page.
- Forcing customers to sign up
- Redirecting customers to another website to pay
- Including unnecessary form fields (keep the form as short as possible)
- Unattractive and less reassuring checkout page
- Vague call to action
5. Clear Dialogue
Make sure your text and dialogue in product’s design is not confusing or unreadable. Designers may not have complete control over what a client wants in a body of text but it is their job to advise them on the best practices such as not jamming the same keyword 10 times in a paragraph of 3 lines or using a font that is hard to read. It’s important to remember that text does not just need to look great; it also needs to read great.
Your language should be clear and simple so that users could understand what is it that you offer, where they can find what they want and how to buy them. Use short paragraphs because they are easier to read.
