User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) play an important role in converting potential visitors into customers at a higher conversion rate. All the aspects of UI/UX of your ecommerce website from the homepage, landing pages, checkout page, navigation, layout, accessibility, payment options to product pages and other elements are important. Some of the examples of good UI/UX ecommerce websites include PayPal, Puma, Nike, Shoeshine, Adidas, Zappos, Wayfair, Nova & more. Top rated ecommerce websites continuously improve their search technology to improve their user interface & user experience (UI/UX) and promote their products relevance at the same time. Amazon, eBay, Buy.com and Staples have already better UX on PC’s, mobiles and tablets and as a result they have more customer retention than the websites with bad user experience. You should design a clean layout which must be easily accessible from all devices – desktop, mobile and tablets. You should do UX testing or usability testing on your website in order to understand what users do and why they do it? The big internet marketing giants like Google, Twitter, eBay and Amazon have incredible UI which has a direct impact on their consumers. These companies continuously test every aspect of their online business with loyal consumers to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction.
Best ranked ecommerce websites constantly improve their search technology to enhance the UI/UX and simultaneously promote the relevance of their products/services. They have best UX on PC’s, mobiles, tablets due to which their customer retention is more than the websites with bad user experience. A layout which is easily accessible from all devices including desktop, mobile and tablets is necessary to achieve these goals. UX testing or usability testing on a website reveals what users do and why do they do it. To make sure to have high levels of customer satisfaction, big marketing companies have an incredible user interface.
There are some things that are an absolute must for an ecommerce website and those include an optimized ecommerce shopping cart design, easy checkout process, comprehensible explanation of every section, summary of the product, testimonials and ratings of the product, details about shipping, clear call-to-action buttons (CTA), color contrast and much more. Visual elements help to improve conversion rates and user experience and hence play a vital part in the success of a website. Take an example of Shop.chopra.com designed by PROS. It is user friendly with ease of navigation, mobile friendly, unique and innovative colors, content focused design, less scrolling, easy to access search bar, featured products, related products, sorting, easy checkout process, better payment options and more. The goal of this ecommerce store is to deliver the best user interface and user experience. As a result, their conversion rate has been doubled within few months.
Website usability testing is one of the concepts in digital publishing that is usually misunderstood. It is a technique that is used to evaluate a product by testing it on users. Your site has usability problems if it is difficult to use or hard to understand and it will result in poor conversions. Website usability testing boosts conversions by identifying all the major sources of friction. Interact with your website and observe the use of real users by paying attention to their experiences and try to identify patterns. The analysis done by Jakob Nielsen shows that the mean increase of conversion rates with usability optimization was 87% which means the conversion rate could almost be double on average.
Your website must be easy to navigate. Simplify navigation for the visitors so that they do not even have to think about their next steps. You can include a navigation option in your website’s footer, place search bar on the top of a webpage and allow users to search for keywords easily and the key point here is to keep navigation consistent across pages on your website. To control user movement through your website you can put the call to action (CTA) at a noticeable spot on the webpage and use a fill color that stands out from its background. Majority of the visitors scan web pages from left to the right which entails that the important elements should be placed towards the center-left. These are few pointers that can help you control user movement through your website. You can make the shopping cart button more appealing with unique designs and use contrasting colors so that the cart does not merge with the layout of the store.
With the advent of smartphones/iPhones the pattern of shopping has transformed. People used to shop in physical stores but then due to the introduction of ecommerce and now mobile commerce, more and more people are using their smartphones to shop. Therefore businesses need to focus on m-commerce and develop mobile friendly ecommerce websites. Emphasis should be placed on making responsive website designs and increase mobile friendliness. You need to make sure that your ecommerce website has a responsive design whether it is accessed from a mobile, tablet, iPad, laptop or a desktop.
You have to simply understand the preferences of your end users which can be different from your own preferences. To know this, you can conduct user testing, collect feedback and apply the proposed changes. In usability testing people are simply given a series of tasks to complete and note down any problems that they face. Steve Krug, the author of “Don’t Make Me Think” explains that the “usability really just means making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing – whether it’s a website, remote control, or revolving door – for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.” User testing provides you direct input on how actual consumers use your site. You may believe that you have designed the best user experience in the world but to observe people interacting with your site is usually a humbling experience.
The thing is that you are not your customer. Your users see your website through their eyes, not yours. You spend a lot time on your site and see the world as you are but usability testing comes into play by giving you total access into what your users are thinking when they are browsing your site. This information will be of great advantage to you as it is better to find flaws of your website before rather than after its launch. With usability testing, you will come to know about most of the flaws before.
One of the main goals of any usability testing is to discover whether users can find and comprehend the information they want or need without difficulty and whether they can fulfill tasks at hand with ease. You can fix the problems and improve the user experience or your website users once any/all of the friction points are identified.
Usability testing can be done for various versions of your site. Recruited testers are observed while completing a given set of tasks on the website. The observation of the users can take place personally or online in which the screen as well as voice of the users is recorded while they state their thought process. Usability testing can be conducted even if your site is not online yet. Hence you can test at any time you want and at any stage of the design process you are. It does not involve thousands of people but it can be done with only 10 people or even less.
Zahoor Bhat has over 10+ years of experience as an online editor and media manager. He has worked with major online news and content sites as a media manager. He is well versed with major content management systems and web platforms such as WordPress and social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google Business, Yelp, Instagram & Linkedin. He is an expert in content creation, proofreading and finally making it live. Being a social media expert, he is able to make relations with social media influencers and make sure to generate leads and grow business via different social media platforms.
