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UX In Ecommerce: What is UX & Why is it Important?

What is UX - Cover Image

At the end of 2019, it is estimated that 1.92 billion consumers shop online. This is expected to rise to a staggering 2.14 billion in 2021. With a huge amount of businesses creating websites for ecommerce, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your ecommerce presence is one that evokes positive experiences, which will bring about conversions and ensure consumer loyalty. With the increase in consumers year by year, there is a lot to gain. This is where User Experience (UX) Design comes in to help.

What Is UX?

UX is the interaction a user has with a product or a service. UX Design considers each different element that shapes this experience by asking the question; “can the consumer easily accomplish their desired tasks/outcomes?”
When it comes to ecommerce, there are many areas that UX needs to consider. The Google UX Playbook outlines those most important as: home/landing page, menu & navigation, search, category/product, conversion, and form optimisation. A UX designers job is to ensure that each one of these sections is streamlined and straight forward so that the consumer can reach their desired goal.

For example, a part of UX is ensuring that your site is optimised for viewing on a mobile device. 52% of users will be less likely to engage with a brand if their experience on mobile is bad. If your landing page is cluttered, difficult to read, doesn’t have an obvious menu, or simply hasn’t translated well to the mobile or tablet screen, then this will likely increase bounce rates and have a negative impact on conversion rate and revenue generation.

Why is UX Important for Ecommerce?

With more and more businesses entering the world of Ecommerce, there is an increase in competition and therefore a greater need to set yourself apart from the crowd.
According to studies conducted by Google, almost 80% of users will simply abandon a site if they don’t like what they see, at which point they will likely go to a competitor site. UX allows you to define the customer journey in a positive, emotional way that is also conducive to business successes. Not only do you want to draw in consumers and make good first impressions, but you also want to ensure loyalty. Make that journey a memorable, positive one so that they return.
Good UX will this increase those all important conversion rates and goals, and loyalty will also mean that consumers are more likely to recommend your business to friends or family.  

Things to Consider

In order to obtain excellent UX, time and effort will need to be put into research.
Rest assured, this is time well spent.

Scoping Your Ecommerce Offering

With use of tools like Google Analytics, you should be able to tell what is doing well and what isn’t. Important site statistics that need to be examined are things like bounce rate, exit pages, clicks, and of course conversions. These statistics might be able to help you pinpoint exactly what needs improvement.

Know Your Consumer Base

Are you purely a B2C ecommerce website? Or do you also have B2B consumers as well? It is vital to examine your consumer demographics in order to understand their needs.

Feedback

One of the things that is very easy to do with UX is to think that everyone believes what you believe. This is called the false-consensus effect. This probably isn’t the case. Therefore, finding out what your consumers actually feel firsthand about your ecommerce site is invaluable.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

What is their ecommerce offering doing that yours isn’t? What important feature do they not have that you could have? Having this information at hand could give you the edge that you need to succeed.

UX design has become a necessary component in ecommerce web development, meaning that it is a huge topic. We’ll be expanding on the numerous elements that contribute to UX in future articles. Next in the series, we’ll be taking a trip down memory lane into the last 20 years of UX, how it has evolved into what it is now, and what is it going to look like in the future.

Resources

UX in Ecommerce Article Series

  1. What is UX & Why is it Important? (this article)
  2. 20 Years of UX Design
  3. The Beginning of the Consumers Journey
  4. Finding What You’re Looking For

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