Many e-commerce businesses make the mistake of relying on generic UI solutions to improve their website's performance. However, in a highly competitive market, user experience (UX) is a critical factor that can determine the success of an e-commerce business. Customers may switch to competitors who offer better user experiences. In this article, we will explore a few effective UX strategies that can significantly enhance an e-commerce website's UX design and boost conversion rates.
Copying UI patterns from successful competitors to improve e-commerce UX design can be costly and rarely yields the desired results. Instead, UI elements should be viewed holistically as a system that shapes the overall user experience. Customers perceive their e-commerce experience as a continuous process, so it's important to approach its UX design similarly.
Good UX design is essential for eCommerce success. As eCommerce platforms become more accessible, competition grows, and improving lead conversion and retention rates requires extra attention to UX. It's not just about delightful UI patterns, but also about providing clients with a consistent shopping experience, an intuitive interface, and excellent service.
I/ Conduct a UX audit to identify UX issues and conversion bottlenecks
The simplest but most important step you can take to reveal bottlenecks in your shop's UX performance is to conduct a UX audit. To do it, you can choose from various user behavior tracking solutions, like Hotjar, Yandex Webvisor etc.
As an example of our work on designing and improving the user experience for the Darty Parts website, we analyzed how customers were using the Parts pages and sections in the native Darty site. Our goal was to identify any obstacles that users encountered while navigating the website, as well as any features that were missing and could be added to enhance the user experience. If we noticed that users were clicking on certain static page elements or sections that seemed to suggest they were looking for more specific or related information, we provided better pathways to help them find what they were looking for in fewer clicks.
The heatmaps, scroll maps, and user mouse tracking allowed us to gain insights into how users interact with our website and improve its functionality. For example, we discovered that we needed to revamp the cart to enable users to change the color of products, vary secondary characteristics, and alter leasing terms. Additionally, the clicks heatmap helped us identify the most popular sections of the product catalog. The scrolling map showed us that many users didn't scroll far enough down the page to see important content "under the fold" in certain instances. The mouse tracking data helped us to enhance the mobile version of the plan selector page, providing us with additional insights and allowing us to consider more elaborate solutions.
II/ Organize in-depth interviews with customers
Conducting interviews with actual clients can be an excellent way to gain insight into their experience with your website. By offering a small reward such as a gift card or a promo code, you can conduct in-depth interviews with multiple clients to better understand how they use your website, what they remember, and why they like it (...or not). These interviews can provide a broader perspective on how clients experience your website's e-commerce features and your company's services.
Here are a few tips for conducting a thorough interview. Every good interview has something in common:
Open-ended Questions: when creating survey questions, it's important to use wording that allows respondents to provide detailed answers about the topic, rather than just answering "yes" or "no". Open-ended questions that start with "why" or "how" are particularly effective, as they give them the flexibility to answer in their own words.
Semi-structured Format: when conducting an in-depth interview, it is important to prepare key questions in advance. However, the interview should also have a natural conversational flow, with questions based on the respondent's previous answers. For instance, if the interviewee mentions that "the elections are coming up," a suitable follow-up question could be, "What are your thoughts on the candidates involved?"
Seek Understanding and Interpretation: It is crucial to apply active listening skills to comprehend what the speaker is conveying. The interviewer must restate what has been said to ensure that the message received is the same as the message conveyed. By reflecting the emotions behind the message, the interviewer can better understand the feelings that the interviewee is trying to express.
Recording Responses: during in-depth interviews, interviewers should record the responses and take written notes to complement them. These notes include observations of verbal and non-verbal behaviors, along with immediate personal reflections about the interview. The purpose of these interviews is to ask questions and systematically record and document responses to gain a deeper understanding.
An in-depth UX interview usually involves a seven-stage approach:
Thematizing: formulate the purpose of your interview and describe the topics to be investigated before the interviews start. A quick online questionnaire could help frame your interviewees and identify the main UX issues into a few topics. The goal is to clarify the why and what of the investigation to give a clear direction to your user research.
Designing: once you have identified the needed information, it is important to create a structured approach to gather it during the interview. A well-defined interview guide that outlines the main topics and questions should be developed to ensure that the information collected is consistent and relevant. This guide should help you stay focused during the interview process and ensure that you cover all the essential topics.
Interviewing: it is important to start the interview by introducing yourself, explaining the purpose of the study, and making the respondent feel comfortable. Your primary responsibility during the interview is to actively listen and observe while guiding the respondent through a conversation that covers all the necessary topics of your guide.
Transcribing: transcribing involves creating a verbatim interview text by writing out each question and response using the audio recording. The interviewer’s side notes should also be included in the transcription and labeled correctly in a separate section.
Analyzing: when analyzing your interview transcripts, you will try to identify any emerging themes from the respondents' answers. You can use your predetermined topics and questions to help organize them. This allows you to link and synthesize the answers to your questions. If the interviews bring up additional questions, it may be necessary to conduct additional interviews after adapting your questionnaire.
Verifying: it involves checking the credibility of the information collected. To achieve this, we commonly use triangulation, which involves multiple perspectives to interpret a single information set. A simple way to use triangulation in a study would be to have two colleagues read and analyze the same transcripts and then compare notes. If the notes match, then the information is considered credible.
Reporting: the final step is to share the interview outcomes with your stakeholders through a written or oral report. For instance, these reports should describe how the results will impact their next actions and shape the future e-commerce experience.
III/ Apply eCommerce UX best practices:
Uncovering what designs cause usability issues and how to turn your current user experience into a “State of the Art” e-commerce experience, is never an easy job. Such guidelines usually consist of extensive research and design iterations, and require time and effort to find the design patterns with the best UX performance and put them to use.
Hopefully, today, guidelines and research on the effectiveness of UI and UX patterns in e-commerce are available to purchase under annotated design examples highlighting UX “violations” and “adherences” (i.e., what the page designs do well and poorly from a UX perspective). By reusing them, you will avoid reinventing the wheel, implement proven user-tested solutions, save your budget from an expensive trial-error method, and improve your overall e-commerce user experience.
These hints can bring good results by themselves, but to provide a solid user experience, you have to look at them systematically. I can help translate the best e-commerce design practices into suitable conversion rate methods.
IV/ Conduct efficient competitive analysis
One of the best ways to learn about the competitive landscape for your website is by conducting a UX competitive analysis. In e-commerce, it’s important to compare your site’s UX with your competitors, even if you don’t have the same resources.
UX competitive analysis researches major competitors to gain insight into their UX performance. The goal is to improve your website’s UX design by examining specific elements and features in competing products, looking for opportunities to better serve users, and avoiding common usability issues. A UX competitive analysis can help you discover the following:
What user experiences are standard in your market
Actionable insights for improving conversions
Opportunities to innovate within your own website’s user experience
What you’re doing right (and what to avoid) in your UX design
By learning from your competitors, you will gather valuable ideas for enhancing your website’s conversion rates. You should identify the methods that work for your rivals and adapt them to your own experience in a cohesive manner rather than using them as isolated examples.
Focus on the tools and techniques that complement and amplify your existing top-performing elements for the most profitable user categories (which will be discussed in the next section). Don't blindly copy everything that appears innovative just because it's new. Only integrate features that match naturally with your e-commerce site and improve its effectiveness.
V/ Test Alternative Design solutions:
The best way to validate your conversion improvement ideas is to test them on real customers or UX testers. In both ways, you implement it by presenting the interactive prototype you’ve developed to a group of users and asking them to perform specific tasks to see for example :
how they navigate the site,
how easily they can complete the buying funnel,
locate and use certain e-commerce features
how useful is the content regarding their shopping experience
You may also ask about their feelings during the experience. This will give you a deep insight into the effectiveness of the design. You may perform the tests by filming the user on video if tests are done in a lab environment. Alternatively, you can deploy an automated service with remote UX testers that would allow for high cost and time savings.
For example, a mobile data provider who wants to improve significantly its subscription rate might need to focus on the data plan selection process at different touchpoints. Based on the research insights, three types of plan selector pages are designed, and we ask users which design option is the best for them. The goal is to discover which option proposes the best information architecture for data plans - from a user perspective - and to validate assumptions at this step of the subscription funnel quickly.
If you have multiple design ideas for a specific UI element, prototypes for each are recommended to put them into context better and get them tested by clients. However, it is advisable to limit the number of design options to three or fewer. If you present too many options, testers may experience the paradox of choice and find it difficult to focus and understand the differences, leading to a decrease in the test's quality. To test the design, five testers are usually enough: a higher number of testers doesn't necessarily yield better results.
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