Why You Should Take UX Seriously
UX (User Experience) is at the heart of every good design. It’s the difference between your customers groaning in wretched frustration, or grinning with enjoyment; with them shaking a defeated fist at your site and hastily clicking away from it, or completing a satisfying purchase and wanting to return for more.
UX is about putting the customer first - who would be a more suitable candidate for the pole position? Your ecommerce store is for them, so it should be designed for them. They’re the person who you want to satisfy the most, and engaging in UX allows you to accomplish this. It can help to turn your site from a means-to-an-end, to a steamrolling ecommerce powerhouse. In a cutthroat global economy with ruthlessly fierce competition, your site absolutely must stand out in order to excel. UX is a tool that can help you achieve this.
Though complex in nature, UX doesn’t have to be expensive. We’ve hand-picked a few of the most cost-effective UX practices that can make a big impact on your webstore and that you can start using right away!
Reduce Cognitive Load (Eraser at the Ready)
Every element and word on your webstore needs to be absorbed and understood by your users. This is called cognitive load - the mental effort being exerted by the user’s working memory. The more cognitive load that you burden your users with, the more stressed and discouraged they’ll become. This is why it’s essential to seize your proverbial eraser, and remove everything that is unnecessary from your webstore.
Pioneering UX professional Steve Krug advises the following:
Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left
- Krug’s Third Law of Usability
Using concise language is one way to reduce cognitive load and speed up the user’s journey. It’ll also reduce the noise level of the page, make your important content more prominent, and result in each page being shorter.
“Happy talk” such as “Welcome to our webstore” should be avoided at all costs. The primary reason people come to your site is to purchase goods and this kind of unnecessary fluff just serves as a hindrance. Consider removing gratuitous pronouns like the “Our” in “Our products”, or the “My” in “My account”. Try to re-write any sentences that might be just a tad too overinflated and wordy. With a little effort, you’ll end up with a more succinct site.
A/B Testing
The most UX-savvy design team in the world can’t anticipate a user’s every desire or action. Every one of us is beautifully unique, and our behaviour exhibits this fact. With A/B testing, you can present different customers with two slightly altered designs, in order to determine what works best for their particular nuances. A simplified example best illustrates this:
Test name: “Complete purchase” button on checkout
If we want to understand which text on the button at checkout performs best we would test two variations:
Design 1: Button uses the text “Complete purchase”
Design 2: Button uses the text “Complete sale”
Conversion goal: Clicking on the button and completing the sale
Randomly displaying the two different designs to customers over a period of time will help you to determine which one converts best.
A/B tests can be set up with Google Analytics or Crazy Egg, both of which are available to install for free in Neto’s add-on store.
Conclusion
UX doesn’t have to be time-consuming or difficult. With the above practices, you can make radical improvements to your webstore’s design, which will enhance the overall experience and increase the likelihood of purchases. Guide your customers effortlessly through your webstore - make UX a primary focus.
Want to learn more about UX Design? Keep reading: Inspiring Ecommerce Websites Part 2