Why positive UX is crucial
You may have the perfect product, and your product may be unique enough so that your competition is minimal, but optimizing your ecommerce site so that it connects with your users and brings them back over and over is what makes your business successful. The best way to ensure that your site performs at the highest level and has the greatest impact on users is to test it with users through UX testing, then to design your site according to what this research reveals.
Ecommerce is fiercely competitive because of the millions of ecommerce businesses that exist. Designing a good site won’t be good enough. Your site should be the best so that your business can reach its greatest potential. After all, your site (or app) is the only opportunity you’ll have to convince users to buy into what you’re selling.
A summary of the process – IA, UI, UX
The first step is to organize and label your site’s content, which makes up the site’s information architecture (IA). A UX research method known as card sorting is a way to learn how users intuitively expect information to be arranged and labeled on your site.
Once the IA is established, the next step is designing your site’s user interface (UI). UI design addresses the functionality, or usability, of your site, in addition to its aesthetic elements, such as typography, imagery, and graphics. These components, such as button placement and how visuals grab users’ attention, influence how users navigate through your site.
UX encompasses your site’s overall impact on your target audience. This includes your site’s emotional impact, which is shaped by the IA and UI. You may use various UX research methods to examine IA or UI elements separately at their respective stages of development, or you may run usability tests to assess how these elements work together, to determine how to fix or redesign your site’s features to optimize UX.
What is successful UX?
The answer is simple – increased conversion rates. This is the ultimate goal for any ecommerce business, followed by conversions that lead to loyal customers. Conversions look different across the board. For some, it’s getting users to make a purchase, signup, request a consultation or quote, or repeated logins.
The evidence
Google increased user engagement by 17% by changing their hotel search’s UX copy from “Book a room” to “Check availability.”
Bing earned an additional $80 million in annual revenue by using a specific hue of blue in their UI.
Samsung doubled its share in the global TV market within two years after interviewing and observing users’ at-home TV usage. They discovered that users saw TVs as a piece of furniture that shouldn’t dominate a room and redesigned their TVs to be minimalistic, slimmer, and hidden.
Unbounce increased their conversion rate to 41% by moving their CTA buttons above the fold on their site’s landing page.
NuFace increased their orders by 90%. after A/B testing a free-shipping threshold (i.e., free shipping with a $75 purchase).
TutorVista increased conversions by 86% after adding video to their site’s landing page to increase subscription signups.
Thoughtful UX design, backed by UX research, is worth the investment. Every dollar you spend on optimizing your site’s UX will yield a $100 ROI. Also, you can work out 85% of usability issues by testing your site with as few as five users. This is why large companies create entire UX teams, comprising UX designers, writers, and researchers. Smaller businesses may tackle the process on their own or hire UX experts to do it for them.
