We love taking the easy route whenever possible. After all, isn’t technology here to make things simpler for us hard-working humans? Attracting new brand devotees and keeping existing users happy is a wondrous struggle. Considering today’s competitive global marketplace, sometimes getting new leads or increasing sales revenue seem impossible! That’s where User Experience Design comes in. Managing the e-commerce shopping experience and tightening up the process to make it pleasant for your customers is an incredibly important part of ensuring your revenue continues to rise. Check out the tips below to see how you can make a few tweaks to your User Experience (UX) for an impressive increase in conversion rates.
1. Automate Your Forms
The more automated your ordering is, the smoother the experience will be and the more you’ll be able to use any data gathered to your advantage. Any time you introduce a form into your ordering process, automate the fields. This can be as simple as automatically filling out the “City” field once someone has entered their ZIP code to changing default settings like shipping options and quantity so that the most popular choice is already highlighted.
2. Save As Much Order Info As You Can
The whole point of online ordering is to increase ease and efficiency. So why not make it as hassle-free as possible? Save a customer’s unique ordering information wherever you can. Try highlighting past orders when users come to your site. Don’t forget to save credit card numbers that have affiliated with their account.
3. Optimize Images in Responsive Web Design
With more and more users making purchases on smartphones and mobile devices, responsive web design is more important than ever. People are incredibly turned off by ugly images that don’t load properly and slow loading pages. Using a script that detects the screen size and automatically resizes images will save your customers a lot of strife and give them a more seamless experience. Not sure the best way to go about setting up responsive images on your site? Chris Coyier has an excellent article on the subject over at CSS Tricks.
4. Adjust Page Hierarchy to Simplify Common Behaviors
Finally, for the butter on Responsive Web Design’s bread, we must always consider intuitive use when creating web forms. There are many ways to track your user’s habits. It’s key to identify the most common ones to design the ultimate user-intuitive layouts. Examples of layout streamlining include:
Listing the country from which a large majority of users visit your site (if applicable) as the first in a dropdown menu.
Defaulting to the most common language
Organizing your navigation bar hierarchy based upon those most-clicked items.
You may also choose to default list results on product pages in order of popularity rather than alphabetically or by price point.
5. Revamp Your Error Response
Talk about a pain in the royal behind! We all hate it when we’ve trudged through a website’s order process only to end up on a big, fat error page. While mistakes do happen, you can handle errors more gracefully on your end. The easiest way is to cache collected data so refreshed pages will return with information still completed.
Also, highlight errors in specified fields with a color other than red, such as orange or yellow. The old adage about “seeing red” is no joke. Studies have shown that red tends to provoke intense and alarming feelings in users.
Lastly, we’re all insecure beings at heart. It’s best to avoid agitating words such as “Failed” when order form completion has gone awry. Take a note from Mailchimp’s quirky style and use carefree wording like, “Oops, there seems to be a mistake” instead.
6. Utilize clear calls to action
To maximize the UX design -- and effectiveness -- of a CTA button, there are a few rules to live by:
Make buttons large and fully clickable -- don't just rely on the text within the button
Write clear, easy to understand messaging. This can be playful and on-brand, but most importantly, users should immediately understand what will happen when they click the button. (Bonus tip: Include a verb, an urgent adjective and keep the whole CTA short and sweet).
The font itself should be readable and large -- now is not the time to play with any trendy, swirling fonts you may have recently discovered. Stick to simple sans-serif typography.
Ensure the call to action stands out. Stay within your color palette but use a hue or unique shape that makes the action stand out and grabs a user's attention to boost conversions.
If it fits with your aesthetic, include tiny complementary design elements, such as an arrow or a shopping cart.
Utilize white space to allow the message to breathe.
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