Optimise the user experience in your webshop
Guest blog written by Emil Borggaard, Web developer Gelinde
3 simple steps to optimise the user experience on your online shop
User experience design is a hot topic these days. It's also called UX design, which really just stands for User Experience Design. It's about designing - in this case - digital user interfaces (webshops, websites and the like) in a way that makes it easy for the user to use the product, without having to think too much about how and how it works, and without being met by annoying elements that cause frustration.
In this short post, you will get 3 concrete and relatively simple tips on how to optimise the user experience on your website or webshop, without having to be a super designer or coder.
#1 Get your popups/modals under control
Today, popups and modals have become incredibly popular. This is perhaps due to the fact that it has become really easy to install them. With a simple script you are usually flying, and the only thing you have to do afterwards is to enter when you want to show your newly installed and smart popup.
But when should you actually show it? Is it as soon as the user lands on the page? Or is it when they have scrolled 50% down through a category page?
There are many different opinions on this, and it certainly differs from store to store, but as a starting point, it's a bad idea to show a popup as soon as the user lands on your page. Especially if the purpose of the popup is to collect the user's email.
You can compare it to going into a physical store. If you've just walked into the shop and the manager immediately asks you if you want 10% off your order in exchange for your email, what do you think?
In 90% of the cases, it will probably be a "Uhh... No thanks. I'm just looking". Because that's what you do. You don't even know if the store has the items you're looking for, after all, you've just walked in the door. And even if the shop has what you're looking for, the price might not be what you expect. So of course you don't want to give out your email the first time you land on a page. Especially when you don't know what they have to offer yet.
In addition, it can also seem annoying that you first have to close a cookie popup, say no thanks to sharing your location and finally have to close another popup with a newsletter sign-up.
So think about how and when you trigger your popups. One solution could be to show the popup the 5th time the customer visits your website, but not before. Then you know that they have had time to look around.
Related: How to make popups in ideal.shop
#2 Get a handle on the visual hierarchy
When you work with the visual hierarchy, you work to direct the user's attention towards the 'right' elements.
You've probably landed on a website before and couldn't find the information you were looking for. Maybe it's because of the lack of subheadings, colours, icons and the like. This is all something you work with when you talk about optimising the visual hierarchy.
Because it's all about dividing up the page so that it's easy for the user to figure out where to look to find what they're looking for.
The image above is a classic example used by designers around the world to illustrate exactly what is meant when talking about visual hierarchy.
The user experience is greatly enhanced when the user can easily find exactly what they are looking for. So remember to make use of headings, subheadings, colours, and much more to clearly divide your content so that your customers can easily find what they need.
#3 Make error messages clear and understandable
If you're a bit of a design and UX nerd, you might be familiar with Jakob Nielsen's 10 heuristics. One of them is about helping the user discover and understand the errors that sometimes occur.
A classic example is the 404 page. Not everyone knows that the 404 status code means that the page could not be found. So instead, make it clear to the customer that they've landed on a page that couldn't be found and how to proceed from there. Include a search box, some popular categories and products to make it easy for them to move on to something relevant.
Another example that is highly relevant for online shops is when the customer - by mistake - fills in the wrong information in the checkout. Maybe they have filled in their name instead of their email, or an address that does not exist. Here it is important to show exactly what goes wrong and how it can be solved so that the user can easily correct the error and quickly move on in the flow.
Need help designing your ideal.shop?
Send me an email at: emil@gelinde.dk
