Introduction
Good user experience can make a positive impact on an eCommerce business if done strategically. Without having a strong user experience direction, the product may not appeal to your business’s target audience (users).
It is highly recommended to include a user-centred design approach in your design process. Which can better help you understand your user’s needs and involve them in every step of the design process (which includes UI/UX design). This will also help you confidently design a product that serves both user and business needs.
Overall organization/structure, usability
An eCommerce website that has an organized navigation is an indicator of good user experience design. One way to visualize and organize your website’s navigation is by creating a website/information architecture. Usually, this step is completed after identifying the user and business goals.
Constructing an Information Architecture
Information Architecture creates a hierarchy of information for your website when designing personalized user experiences in eCommerce. Source: Pixel Fridge
Typically, building the eCommerce business structure for a website begins with a tree graph, with the home page being at the centre of the root. Smaller branches represent the pages that link out from the homepage. It is important to note that all branches link to each other.
Having a strong website architecture is one effective way to strengthen your website’s user experience. This allows users to seamlessly navigate through the website. Some best practices would include; having a simple navigation menu, keeping website elements consistent, and utilizing breadcrumbs (links that show the current page’s parent pages).
Better understanding of audience (through user experience design)
User experience design gives you the opportunity to understand your target audience, their behaviors, and how to retain more customers. This can help you create personalized interactions that are intentional and based on understanding your audience’s preferences. As a result, customers will be more inclined to return to your online store if they find it seamless to use.
One way to better understand your audience is through the process of user experience research, which includes interviews and surveys. This will allow you to learn about their age, culture, potential problems and needs, and more.
UX that effectively guide users
It’s important to ensure that the user experience design of your website covers the entire user journey. This journey should be clear and easy, preventing any additional steps or tasks that could be frustrating for a possible buyer. For example, an inconvenient menu or poorly designed filtering system can cause the user to leave your website altogether.
Creating a customer journey map is a key component in good user experience design because it can help you visualize the process that a person experiences in order to accomplish a particular goal on your website.
Let’s talk about the structure of a customer journey map!
The customer journey map is a good component of user experience research. It should tell a “story” from the customer’s point of view. This map should also reveal any pain points that need to be addressed, hence the different phases shown on the chart.
A customer journey map gives you the opportunity to think about scenarios and answer questions relating to your customer persona, and how they could possibly interact with your website. Once you have identified user pain points and aligned the journey map to your business goals, you can now use it to measure any goals you’re trying to achieve.
Accessibility-focused design
UX/UI is not only about beautiful visuals and structure, it is also about building content that is accessible through accessibility web design. This will make your eCommerce website available to a wide range of users and a better experience for everyone, which includes people who may have disabilities, for example.
One method to make your website accessible is to ensure that the foreground and background have enough color contrast that benefits people who have low vision. This allows them to read text against a background color. There are several web tools that can help you figure out the contrast ratio between text and its background. The WebAIM color contrast checker helps you to calculate the contrast score between two color values.
Another simple method would be to incorporate navigation options that are understandable and consistent for the user. This includes consistent navigation across all pages of your website from page naming, site styling, and more. Having a site search is another great feature that helps users know where they are in your website.
The two methods listed above can be used as a starting point to making your website accessible to everyone, in turn helping improve your eCommerce business.
Leveraging Customer Feedback to improve UI/UX
Taking advantage of customer feedback and qualitative data can help improve the user experience of your eCommerce website. Gathering e-commerce customer feedback can be done in several ways, such as live chat transcripts, surveys, on-site surveys, and customer interviews, to name a few.
It is important to run user tests whenever there are any repetitive issues that customers may be experiencing on your website, creating an opportunity to receive UX design feedback.
Usability testing (or user testing) is a method that assesses the website’s functionality. With this method, important insights can be gathered to help improve your website. Qualitative data include any findings that have been observed and recorded. Questionnaires and interviews are two well-known methods to successfully analyze qualitative data.
Conclusion
Any of these 5 strategies could be used as a starting point to help improve your eCommerce business. Understanding your buyers and maintaining a user-centred perspective is also essential. When keeping all of these things in mind, you’ll have the opportunity to create a positive online shopping experience for everyone.
