Better UX Design = More Heels in My Wardrobe
As most women, I love shopping, but to be honest I can’t recall the last time I went to a shopping center to buy clothes or shoes. It’s not that I’m lazy, I just love the wide range of products and bargain prices you can find online. The only thing which makes me a bit nervous is the uncertainty whether the lovely red heels will be lovely or red (not claret) indeed.
I’m not the only one who faces that anxiety. The practice of doing research online before buying a product or using a service has become so common that it even earned its own name — Zero Moment of Truth, or shortly ZMOT. No matter how great the product seems, most people won’t buy it unless they read at least few reviews. But what if these reviews say nothing more than ‘Great product’? Does it really help customers? Well, not necessarily.
Good news is that a well-thought out UX design can facilitate the customers’ research process. There are at least few ways to make it much more user (and business) friendly. Some of my ideas below:
Text Reviews with Focus
Text reviews are the most common and so the customers are used to them. However, as mentioned before, they often prove meaningless. If you leave an empty input, most of customers will type just few words. The solution is to divide the input into few sections each focusing on the different aspect of the product. If an ecommerce shop sells only one category of products these can be very detailed. For example in the case of clothes such aspects as size, colour, length and quality of fabric can be assessed by customers. If a shop sells various products, the focus of sections can be more general: quality, value for money, look, usability, general satisfaction — these can work for practically all ecommerce shops.
Additionally, it’s a good idea to put microcopy in the input field so that the customer don’t have to wonder what they could write. If it’s written in a clever way and accommodated to the target customers as well as shop’s personality, microcopy can not only make it easier for customers to review the product, but can actually encourage them to do it. Such microcopy should work perfectly for a young customer of a hip electronic shop.
Product Picture Comments
Another idea to make reviews more detailed and entertaining is to allow customers to comment on the selected elements in the product picture. Have you ever visited Sound Cloud? If so, you definitely noticed the comments that appear below the recording. That solution enables listeners to refer specifically to a given fragment in the song. Clever, isn’t it?
Similar solution could work equally well in the case of product reviews on ecommerce websites. After a selected element of the image is clicked on, an input box can appear allowing customers to share their thoughts on it and read comments others put in. Alternatively, comments can be replaced by emojis directing to full reviews. Such way of reviewing a product is not only fun and innovative but, what’s the most important: very precise.
Heat Maps
‘Best sellers’ or ‘Others also bought’ sections are getting old. They start to be like banners — customers no longer pay attention to them. It’s much better to present shoppers with something more eye-catching and fascinating such as heat maps. These show spots on the website which are most often clicked on. Majority of ecommerce owners use heat maps in order to monitor the effectiveness of their websites. Why not to present them to customers? If implemented as a feature that appears on the product listings page on user’s demand, this can be really helpful. By seeing what others clicked on, the customers will know which products are in demand and worth taking a look at.
Had I seen more UX solutions like these on e-commerce website, the number of shoes in my wardrobe would definitely get bigger.
