When shopping online, prospective buyers need to be able to effectively interact with your site. User experience design makes these interactions more seamless.
Best defined as the process of building a website with your end-user in mind, user experience design (UX) serves as a bridge between your site visitors and the actions you intend for them to make on your site (for instance, making a purchase or signing up for a website.) UX is a design process that lets you intentionally build the site with the users in mind so you can usher them along a predetermined set of actions.
Why is UX Important?
User experience design helps ensure that your site is used in a way that gets visitors to take the actions you intend for them to take. UX on an ecommerce site can help site visitors find the products they are looking for and ensure a seamless checkout process. In fact, poor UX design is one of the single biggest reasons that people abandon their cart on an ecommerce site. Conversely, a good user experience is a key reason why people decide to buy online.
Below, we’ve outlined common web design mistakes to avoid when building your magento ecommerce site.
7 Magento UX design mistakes to avoid
- Non-responsive site: According to Statista, in 2020 over 90% of Internet users used their mobile device to go online. This means that it’s more important than ever to make sure your site works properly on mobile or tablet. When in the early design process, it’s important to work with your developer to make sure the site will be built with responsive design in mind. Additionally, make sure your site looks good on mobile. Some designers and developers specialize in mobile-first design, ensuring your site will have all the proper functionality on mobile to make sure users have the ecommerce experience you intend them to have.
- Slow load times: Online consumers are incredibly savvy. They make near split second decisions about whether a site is reputable based on the interface. If your site is loading slow, you risk having a potential customer leave the site. Optimize your load times on the backend through elegant code. Also, think twice about design elements that slow load times like complex design or plugins. Work with your developer early on to optimize page load speed to make sure you don’t miss out on potential customers.
- Missing functionality: While beautiful design is important, it means nothing if your site is missing out on key functionality. A few elements are especially important for ecommerce sites, including:
- The ability to save a wishlist for later: users enjoy the “window shopping” experience of an ecommerce site. They may have things competing for their attention, though. A wishlist helps them revisit a site at a better time when they are ready to make a purchase.
- Guest checkout: in the interest of time, some users don’t want to have to login to make a purchase. Others don’t feel comfortable putting their private information into an ecommerce site for safety reasons. Guest checkout helps users complete their purchase quickly and without security concerns.
- Live chat: in certain instances, a live chat function can help users ask questions quickly so that they don’t leave your site. The live chat can also help with any technical issues that may keep a customer from making a purchase.
- Product searches: depending on the size of your ecommerce store, your users may request search functionality. For instance, they may want to be able to search for clothing by size or speciality items by product type. Enabling search functionality helps users get to where they need to go.
- Streamlined design: Overall, it’s important to think about how your users will actually use the site. Instead of building functionality because it looks or sounds cool, it’s important to think about how to make the site as straightforward as possible while getting users where they need to go. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a great framework to use best practices to increase the usability of your site.
- Non-optimized content: Your ecommerce content needs to tell a compelling story while being clear, direct and SEO optimized. Part of a good user experience is ranking on Google, and its algorithms know when your site isn’t SEO optimized ( they’ll penalize you for it.) UX copywriters specialize in crafting compelling calls to action (CTAs) and making sure your site copy is built with conversion in mind.Work with your developer throughout the design process to implement proper technical SEO including optimizing product page URLs, including meta tags and titles, and using headers and title tags. While you can optimize your SEO over time, you want to start with a basic SEO framework to help with your organic ranking.
- Confusing check-out process: It’s pretty common for users to abandon their checkout carts. It’s so common, in fact, that it’s one of the biggest sources of lost income for ecommerce providers. According to Statista, 88% of shopping carts were abandoned in 2020, representing billions of dollars of lost profits. Rely on seamless user experience to make sure users know exactly how to check-out and make it as easy as possible by limiting the steps it takes to complete the process. Bonus tip: you can also let users know how far they are along in the checkout process by including progress indicators. Another bonus? Use social proofing as much as possible by including security badges and testimonials from other happy customers.
- Choosing the wrong hosting site: Make sure to choose a hosting site that is built to support the latest features in Magento 2. Otherwise, you risk slow load times which translate to bad conversion rates. You want to find a hosting site with lightning fast hosting, great customer service and reasonable contract terms. It might cost a little more, but it will more than make up for it with customers that actually purchase your online products.
- Not choosing the right extensions: Magento has thousands of extensions. There are so many that it can be hard to keep track of what to implement first. When it comes to user experience, several are designed to optimize your site’s functionality. We recommend narrowing down your search by using these filters: price, ratings, editions, versions and partner types. Read more on What To Look For in a Magento Extension to learn how extensions can help with your user experience.
Get in touch
Wondering how we’ve helped other companies create a compelling magento user experience? Read our pinch-a-penny case study.
Don’t let UX errors slow your eCommerce site down. Discover some tips to optimize and improve your Magento user experience and make sure you keep our Magento eCommerce Launch Checklist handy to ensure your new Magento site is following best practices.
Get in touch with our certified Magento team and see how our Magento development services can help. And if you’ve ever been curious about how to keep your site running smoothly in the long run, you may want to learn about ongoing support options and why your Magento site needs a maintenance retainer.