Is Your Website Useful to Customers?

Once you have an e-commerce site running and you’ve made some efforts to be found online and generated some business, visitors and previous customers may not stick around. If your site is a little unstable or a little clunky, you will end up losing people. If the checkout experience is clumsy or confusing, people will abandon your cart. To create a great e-commerce UX (user experience), you must first understand your customers. Only then can you begin to create a great website.

Are You Obeying Key E-commerce UX Design Principles?

You can find a number of design rules to follow in creating a great user experience. Most of the rules seem to be derived from two principles: focus on the users’ needs and make it easy for customers to do what you want them to do. Your site is useful to the extent that it reflects those two principles. Site performance is one area where that second principle is important.

Is Your Site Fast on Mobile Devices?

Slow page loading is one of the main reasons that people abandon a website. Google’s best practices recommends limiting page loading to no more than three seconds. Make sure each page loads that fast on mobile devices for two reasons. First, many of your potential customers are looking up your company on a mobile device. Second, Google uses loading time for your mobile site as a ranking factor. You can find free tools online that measure page loading speeds. If any of your pages are “slow,” you have a few simple technical options for speeding them up.

Are Your Pages Scannable?

Is it easy to scan your site and find product information? Most people only scan pages for useful information versus reading every line. It is easy to understand this point in the abstract, but it can be tough to write content that is easy to scan. Put your key points in bulleted or numbered lists. Use short sentences and short paragraphs with subheads that help readers find a specific piece of information. The whole site needs to be easily searchable as well.

Is Site Navigation a Breeze?

If the site is big, you want to both provide a search function and make sure the site navigation scheme includes logical categories and subcategories. Broken links are another problem to avoid. When a link goes to a 404 error page, customers get annoyed because they haven’t found the information they wanted. You can use Google’s Webmaster tools or free service to crawl your site and find broken links. You’ll also want every page to be easy and fast to use, and buying needs to be super easy.

How’s the Checkout Experience?

This is an area of the e-commerce UX that can be easy to overlook. Customers sometimes abandon their shopping carts because checking out is a hassle. Avoid this issue by making the process as easy as possible. If you’ve tried to optimize your page load speeds and made your site mobile-friendly, much of the hard work is done. Go above and beyond by allowing guest purchases. People who have to create an account on your site might not do it. Display photos of what the customer put in their cart instead of just listing the cart’s contents.

UX Design Knoxville

You can make sure your website is super easy to use and informative by taking some steps to review and improve the content, the navigation, and the site’s performance. Whatever you can do to make a shopper’s experience more pleasant is going to yield more sales. And, if your user experience design is a challenge, get in touch with us so we can discuss how best to help you.