Bad UX: It’s the Reason Your E-commerce Site Isn’t Performing
Is your e-commerce conversion rate hurting? This is probably why.
If you aren’t thinking about user experience design, or UX, you should be. Your competitors are, and it can drastically affect your customers and profits…so you should think of it as a big problem.
User experience generally can be seen as your customer’s experience shopping on your site from arrival to checkout. We can use UX to see how quick, easy and enjoyable it is for your shoppers to maneuver your site and ultimately purchase something. UX is a lot more than good design — it’s about function. You should be asking yourself these questions (and many more) in regards to your e-commerce site:
- Does my site load quickly?
- Is it easy to navigate?
- Is it enjoyable and convenient to use on a mobile phone?
- Is my copy clear and effective?
- Are icons easy to decipher?
- Have any unnecessary steps in my customer’s shopping journey been removed?
It’s as simple as this: a bad experience causes a shopper to leave your site. Your customers have way too many other e-commerce options these days, so if your UX is frustrating, your shoppers will leave. If you focus on UX, you will understand your customer’s intent and be able to help them reach those goals.
Here are 4 E-commerce UX Guidelines, courtesy of Shopify:
— Function above all else. Good design is important, but usability is crucial. Trends like parallax scrolling, ghost buttons, and automatic image sliders at the top of your home page, all look pretty — but they don’t usually perform well. Parallax scrolling can unnecessarily complicate your site, ghost buttons look un-clickable, and automatic image sliders distract and are known to perform poorly (people don’t ever make it to that 3rd slider). Take a queue from the big names, Amazon and Google — they don’t have fancy design because their focus is on function and little distraction. People visit your site with a goal in mind, and you need to help them reach those goals.
— Your copy should lead the design. If you want to have good UX, you have to write your copy first, and then design your layout. Design should support and enhance the copy, not the other way around. Your value proposition and content is ultimately what is going to sell that pair of shoes, not the design. Make sure to keep who your customer is in mind while writing this copy — which you can do by understanding your shoppers needs, how they describe your products and looking at several other criteria.
— Develop a well-thought out navigation that aids discoverability. An intuitive site means your visitors can do or find whatever they want on your site with little interruption or confusion. One of the biggest problem areas for websites is the navigation, which is vital to helping your visitor find what they are looking for. You can and will lose customers if you have poor navigation. Here are some ways to build a better navigation:
- Doing a card sort can help you understand how your visitors expect to find products or pages
- Use familiar words, don’t make people guess
- Similarly, keep things familiar — put your shopping cart in the top right corner.
- Make sure your navigation is easy enough to tap on a mobile device (not too small for fingertips)
- Always include a search bar for people to find things faster
- Make sure to use breadcrumbs — please don’t leave shoppers stranded on a page with no way to get back
- Keep your navigation as consistent as possible page to page
— Mobile e-commerce is different, so you need to treat it differently. Shoppers on mobile want something very different from your store than desktop shoppers. Just throwing up the same UX from your desktop in a responsive format is not enough — the experience should be optimized for mobile users. Here are a few things to keep in mind when considering UX for your mobile e-commerce site:
- Keep things natural and familiar to mobile users — you should be able to zoom into your product photos using the pinch or double tap method most people are used to using on their cellphones
- Make sure you highlight important features so that users don’t miss them
- Disable autocorrect on your checkout — no easier way to frustrate and potentially lose customers if they have to type in their home address 3x on their small mobile screens
- 61% of mobile users say they sometimes or always move to their desktop to finish their purchase, so make sure the cart saves and is waiting for them when they do
- Experiment with digital wallets to encourage shoppers to finish their purchases on mobile
- Speed is crucial on mobile apps, so make sure your pages are loading quickly
- Allow customers to save information for future visits, since filling out information on mobile can be tedious
How do you know where the UX problems on your site are? Do research. Define where users are dropping off. Do they make it past product pages? Are they calling it quits when they see shipping prices, or when they have a full cart? Focus on specific objectives, like reducing cart abandonment or increasing time spent on product pages.
There are some inexpensive methods to do research, which include scroll/click heat-mapping, session replays, and user testing. These methods let you see where your users are clicking, what their goals are and how they are navigating your site to identify frustration points.
Here are some tools you can use to conduct this research:
What you should understand by now is that you need to care about the UX of your website, because if you aren’t paying attention to your customer’s experience with your website, then you can’t effectively meet their needs. There is too much competition these days to not be tailoring your shoppers experience on your website. Get out there and make your customer’s experience with your e-commerce site easy and enjoyable so they keep coming back for more.
