By Owen Fay . Posted on August 5, 2022In the post-pandemic era, the role that digital marketing has played is incredible. Today’s experiences with online markets and e-commerce are completely different than they used to be. Why? Because digital marketing has become the main focus for almost all online businesses, reaching more users, gaining more impressions, and allowing users to leave positive and negative feedback on all of the products and services they use.
As we focus more on user experience (UX), the best way to create outstanding UX is to meet the needs of your customers. Next comes the user-friendliness of the design, when pitching a product online, the concept needs to be easily understood and straightforward. In order to create a great user experience, an organization’s offerings must be streamlined in terms of engineering, marketing, and interface design.
Oftentimes, customers confuse UX and usability; usability is how successfully a person can use a product to accomplish a specific goal. Whereas UX is a broader concept, encompassing the end user’s entire experience with a product, not just how well the product worked, but how they expected it to work, how they feel while using it, and how they feel about the company overall.
Moreover, distinguishing user experience from the user interface is equally important. A user interface is the screens, buttons, menus, icons, and other visual elements that someone interacts with on a website or app. If you have a great interface that is visually appealing, attractive, and attention-grabbing, that doesn’t necessarily mean the UX is great.
For example, if you have a website for dog food that has great graphics, appealing colors, and valuable information but a user cannot find what they are looking for through the UX the design is worthless.
Is Spectacular UX a ‘Game Changer’ for Businesses?
With online industries growing exponentially it has created a multitude of benefits for sellers. This has simultaneously increased competition in the digital market.
“The standards for mobile e-commerce app design that businesses follow have become unbelievably high. If your company is planning to develop its online presence then it is never too late to start at any point. It is all about consistent branding, a strong message to the audience, transparency towards the customers, and making their online experience a lot more meaningful.” – Eric McGee, Senior Network Engineer at TRG Datacenters
The main thing that differentiates a good idea from a good implementation is a weak design. If your company already has an existing design but it isn’t effective, it can always be tested and optimized. Redesigning can help strengthen your online presence and if you are aiming to lead a niche market, a sustainable and efficient design will always help you attract the right audience. Creating a magnificent UX design is a ”game changer” for any online business and its importance can not be understated!
In this article, we have put together 15 UX design tips from experts for creating a seamless online shopping experience. Let’s dive in!
1) Adding High-Resolution Images Improves Credibility
When online shopping hit its peak during covid, what would you as a customer mostly rely on? We all found a seller’s website credible if the images they had shared of the product were real and high resolution. An original picture that has been taken particularly for a brand is far more effective than stock images, or copies of the original. This is undoubtedly why high-resolution content on your website does have an impact on the buyer.
“When sharing the original files of these images from one device to another make sure you use an email, airdrop, or hard drive to transfer your original image files.” – Lachlan de Crespigny, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Revelo
2) Ensuring Data Validation
What do real-time updates do? They save time! Mostly when a user has made any purchase and moves towards filling in details for shipping or payment the user should see errors or other important notifications. This helps the seller or the website owner process the orders and registrations much more smoothly. Make sure the notifications are visible enough for the user to see.
3) Pleasing Aesthetics
Are you wondering how attractive designs can boost a website’s performance? As a website designer, your primary concern should be to see how efficiently the information on the website is being communicated to the user and how the aesthetics match the content on the website. Moreover, a well-organized website and easy navigation will not only save the customer’s time but will keep the user engaged with the content. After hiring dedicated developers for your UX design, every decision that they make for any part of the website should conform to aesthetics.
The common definition of aesthetics is – an artistically beautiful or pleasing appearance. Oftentimes, aesthetics is confused with design trends. For the design, you can add any typography of your choice, add pictures of your choice, and choose the best attention-grabbing layouts, but in the end, aesthetics is when all of these design elements align with one another and give the user an enjoyable experience.
You also need to remember that visitors equate good design with good quality. So, even the simplest design on your website has to be outstanding in order to create a positive brand image and increase sales through the site.
4) Eye-Catching Home Page
Why worry so much about your homepage? Because it’s often the first page a visitor will land on when they find your business. This is why it needs to be one of the best pages on your website. Include effective videos, high-quality images, company description, and product explanations, but don’t miss out on featuring testimonials, ratings, and reviews. The visitors can be your future customers and they will be more likely to convert if they see positive reviews from the past users.
“Use a simple, uncluttered design and a few words that will not distract the buyer but give them a clear idea of what you are trying to sell.” – Bertrand Theaud, Founder & CEO of Statrys
Trending Ecommerce shops generally offer collections of items to guide user tendencies, for example, they may feature a grid with all of the most famous women’s clothing, or they might offer recommended products based on past customer experiences.
5) An Easy Checkout Form
Would you want to spend hour after hours choosing the right product just for the sake of confirming your order? No, right? We always prefer a simple checkout process. A complex checkout may push the visitors to leave their filled cart and move to a website where buying is faster and easier. We all know shopping in itself can be very time-consuming because it takes time to scroll through multiple options and find the product you want. Once you do find what you’re looking for you don’t want to go through a confusing or long checkout process.
“A website designer must always consider the type of users when it comes to designing a website. Not every buyer will be millennial and fully aware of the technology. Some users may not be very familiar with complex interfaces which can affect their overall user experience. Simplicity for the win!” – Robert Warner, Head of Marketing at VirtualValley
6) Exceptional UX for the Search Engine
Whenever you are evaluating anything in terms of website design and you are stuck in a pool of ideas then always try to place yourself in the shoes of the people who will be ‘searching’ through multiple products on your website. When a buyer is searching for something specific they want to be able to find it fast,, A website needs to create an interface and experience that is industry appropriate and effective!
So, how do you know how interactive your web design is? You analyze your web traffic through your domain. Your web metrics like time on site, number of clicks, and bounce rate will help you understand the experience your website visitor is having. You can use heat mapping services to understand how exactly your website visitors are using your website. According to a blog post in Think With Google, 1-800-Got-Junk decreased its load time by 28% and received a 19% increase in mobile sessions by creating a more effective user experience.
Another way to understand how effective your website design is with remote user testing, there are a number of platforms including Poll the People that allow you to test your designs before launch. Understanding users’ needs, expectations, and experiences is essential to creating great UX. Test your design with real people in under an hour and optimize your website.
7) Highlighting Key Features of the Products
Your product’s features are anything that distinguishes your product from your competitor’s. Highlighting these features can instantly gain the attention of your target audience. However, while developing the website, we must not forget to match the content to the needs and expectations of users. You don’t want them to run away with too much information, opting for an indirect strategy to pitch your product could make a huge difference. You must always highlight the major differences or unique selling points of your product before you move towards any other details.
“Try to give more reasons to your customers as to why they must prefer your product, Put out all your achievements smartly on to your website as well.” – Martin Lassen, Founder & CEO of GrammarHow
There’s nothing better than a happy customer who believes in your brand quality and gets an unforgettable user experience with new key features every time they click to shop through your website.
8) Pre-filling Shipping and Billing Details
Are you not amazed by technological advancements these days? We certainly are! With improved technology, our lives have not only become easier but faster at the same time. Pre-filling shipping and billing details using customer data and accounts will save the user time and create an amazing user experience that will undoubtedly change them from visitors to customers with just a click!
9) Option to Save a Shared Cart of your Products
“Sometimes buyers want to skim through multiple sites and save products before they decide on their final purchase. This allows them to compare prices among different e0commerce stores or consult their choices with family or friends.” – Steve Elliott, Franchise Owner, Restoration1
Bookmarking at times is not as convenient as having all the items from multiple stores sorted in a shared cart or one place. This is a great way to help the customers explore all of the options within their price range. If a wishlist is to be truly user-friendly make sure that the customer can share it with others online because the ones that they want to consult with during shopping may not be with them at that time. Make these wishlists shareable through an email, social media, and also enable customers to create a shareable link.
10) Creating User-Specific Wishlists
At the end of the day, it is all about making your users happy and a shopping cart that remembers them is a great way to do that. If a user feels that they cannot afford the total cost of their order, they might remove a few items from the cart. Provide an option for them to either save that product or add it to a wishlist so that they don’t lose track of it.
“By tracking their wishlist through AI and knowing the kind of products they are looking into, you can re-target them to remind them of the products they wanted to purchase from your website.” – Mark Valderrama, Owner of Aquarium Store Depot
When a user wants to take items out of the cart, name it ‘remove’ instead of ‘delete’. Additionally, allow the user to set the quantity to zero to remove an item from the cart. Once the user clicks the remove button, instead of removing the item immediately ask if the click was intentional. Making recommendations to your buyers relevant to the products they have viewed will allow them to navigate effectively through the website.
11) Personalized Content
Are you more likely to respond to an ad when it is personalized or when it is generalized? Instinctively, we respond to personalized content faster. It immediately grabs our attention and we are likely to at least skim through the ad.
“To improve the reach of your website, personalized targeting through ads can add value to the number of sales. Since with marketing of this sort, the users are more likely to click on the link to your website.” – Kathryn Smithson, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at PathSocial
12) Efficient Navigation
Efficient navigation is critical when you have a lot of categories, content, or products with many options. Time-saving will always be a customer’s top priority hence the quicker people come across what they want, the quicker they will move towards the payment and checkout process.
Categorization is another essential element for improving a user’s overall experience. Always categorize your products properly and create sub-properties of the products if required. Don’t forget about hidden menus. Over the last few years, minimalism has continued to be one of the most consistent web design trends, focusing on clean, simple, and easy-to-navigate aesthetics and giving prominence to imagery and large backgrounds.
13) Improve your Website’s Reach with Effective SEO
Use ways to lead your users through your website and distribute PageRank to your category pages. Use relevant, lowest-difficulty keywords in your page, title, URL, headings, and across the description text. Provide a summary of the product along with product photos. These days mobile e-commerce is as popular as ever, a good web design accounts for users on both desktop and mobile devices.
“With effective SEO, the reach and engagement on your website are improved.” – Derek Bruce, Operations Director at Manchester First Aid Courses
Every brand wants to appear on Google’s number 1 page and there is no better way to do that consistently than publish content with primary and secondary keywords and run google ads in order to reach the maximum audience. These articles and blogs can be published on your website or on any external website that has a similar target audience.
14) Avoid Text-Heavy Backgrounds
Pairing text-heavy content with sloppy design could possibly be the worst combination. It is always smart to explain your message in as few words as possible, if you can explain the product and its benefits in a few words users are more likely to buy. The key to simpler navigation with content-rich websites is to stick to a rigid main structure, such as a tiled layout with titles and minimal subtext.
Too much information is always a bad idea given that the customers are more concerned about the product we are trying to sell and the experience of other buyers. Our personal brand story does not need too many details because half of the customers aren’t interested, focus on the products, services, benefits, and features.
“A brand must always focus more on the needs and experience a customer will gain through navigating your website and you would only want it to be nothing less than spectacular!” – Abdul Saboor, Full Stack Developer at The Stock Dork
15) Enhanced Filtering Options
Some customers like scrolling through multiple products whereas some of them want to filter out the exact product they are looking for. Meaning advanced filtering options can allow users to find what they are looking for fast, creating a great user experience.
“When designing a website, allow users to sort by price, category, gender, color, etc., and may as well add advanced options as sub-filters to the main filtering categories.” – Brady McAninch, CEO of HM-Attorneys
Interesting UX design stats
A report on finances online has forecasts related to the web design software market which is expected to touch an estimated value of $13.6 billion by 2027. A 9.4% compound growth rate is expected from the website design market.
The Average Cost of Designing a Website
Image source: Finances Online
The following are some of the most relevant website builder software market statistics to date.
- The estimated value of the website builder software market is forecast to reach $13.6 billion by 2027. (Zion Market Research, 2019)
- Experts predict that the estimated growth rate of the website builder software market is 9.4%. (Zion Market Research, 2019)
- North America still holds the largest market share in the sector. (Zion Market Research, 2019)
- Technological advancements are seen as the reason for the massive adoption of software in the North American market. (Zion Market Research, 2019)
- Squarespace and Wix occupy 55% of the website builder market. (SiteBuilderReport, 2020)
- Wix.com’s share worth was around $146.70 in early 2020. (WebsiteToolTester, 2020)
Conclusion
A number of businesses focus on developing an interesting homepage for their businesses but forget to focus on the internal pages where the products are listed. It is never guaranteed that a user understands your brand and knows exactly what to do once they land on your website.
They might come across a product’s link on their social media and decide to open it. How do you imagine their experience to be if they never actually land on your homepage? This will in one way or the other, leave a poor impression on the visitor. It is equally important to take your time and put effort into developing each and every element of your business instead of focusing on certain pages and ignoring the rest.
UX design can be an exciting and fun initiative for any business, but it takes a lot of time, effort, and analysis to create designs that users love. To create the most effective user experience make sure to follow these 15 tips for online shopping and take the expert opinions into account.
Once you start creating your design, take it to Poll the People to run a user research test before launch. It will eliminate the guesswork from designing and validate decisions to create the best experience possible. Sign up for free today and make your next great UX decision in minutes.
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